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by yoan9224 168 days ago
Cool concept! I built something similar (real-time visitor locations on a globe) and have a few thoughts:

1. How are you handling connection scaling? Realtime presence with many concurrent users gets expensive fast. We cap concurrent WebSocket connections and batch updates every few seconds rather than streaming every event.

2. The pin clustering looks good - are you using a quadtree or just distance-based clustering? At higher zoom levels the overlap can get chaotic.

3. One thing that worked well for us: showing a brief "trail" or fade-out when someone leaves, rather than just disappearing. Makes it feel more alive.

What's your stack? The latency feels snappy.