Show HN: A zoomable timeline of 4M Wikipedia events

#1

Post by lortex » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 6:37 PM UTC

I'm building a journal app in Kotlin Multiplatform and for this purpose I have created a zoomable timeline interface.

This is a side-project where I reuse the timeline interface to display 4 million events imported from Wikipedia / Wikidata, scored using PageRank. There is more information on the about page.

If you're interested in the stack: I use Kotlin Multiplatform extensively, with Compose Multiplatform for the UI, communicates with the backend using Kotlinx-RPC and behind the hood a simple Postgres database on a Hetzner machine.

Show HN: A zoomable timeline of 4M Wikipedia events
app.everything.diena.co

Re: Show HN: A zoomable timeline of 4M Wikipedia events

#2

Post by Jtarii » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 7:46 PM UTC

Instantly freezes the moment I try to interact with it on firefox.

Re: Show HN: A zoomable timeline of 4M Wikipedia events

#3

Post by 0gs » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 7:50 PM UTC

yeah, borked on Chrome Android too. too bad, i want to see it!

Re: Show HN: A zoomable timeline of 4M Wikipedia events

#4

Post by lortex » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 8:05 PM UTC

Jtarii wrote: post #2

Instantly freezes the moment I try to interact with it on firefox.

Hi, thank you for giving it a try ! I test both on Firefox (152) and Chrome, mobile and desktop. If you don't mind please send me (lucas@pluvina.ge) the error message that appears in the console.

Re: Show HN: A zoomable timeline of 4M Wikipedia events

#5

Post by lortex » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 8:08 PM UTC

0gs wrote: post #3

yeah, borked on Chrome Android too. too bad, i want to see it!

Hi, I'm sorry for that, my backend is struggling a bit I didn't expect to be on the front page so soon. On https://www.diena.co/everything/ there is a page with a video if you want to see how it looks and behaves.

Re: Show HN: A zoomable timeline of 4M Wikipedia events

#6

Post by Arslan1997 » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 8:16 PM UTC

This is awesome

Re: Show HN: A zoomable timeline of 4M Wikipedia events

#7

Post by ss2f » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 8:35 PM UTC

Fantastic! Testing this on linux-gnome-firefox is smooth.

Re: Show HN: A zoomable timeline of 4M Wikipedia events

#8

Post by darkstarsys » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 8:40 PM UTC

See also my log-scale timeline of the universe — hand-curated rather than a giant import, and I hope also a bit nicer/simpler UI: https://deep-timeline.org

Re: Show HN: A zoomable timeline of 4M Wikipedia events

#9

Post by maxlin » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 8:42 PM UTC

Cool, though I assume there's some accuracy shortfalls, when not close to zero the UI breaks when years are ~1 pixel in size.

Probably doesn't matter for much of the content, though immediately comes to mind that for after big bang there is "known events" that happened at second-scale. Don't know if there's exact Wikipeida articles of those, but with an appropriately accurate timestamp storage & handling (128bit? more?), one could well zoom in to those if they did exist.

Re: Show HN: A zoomable timeline of 4M Wikipedia events

#10

Post by stvltvs » Fri, Jul 17, 2026, 8:45 PM UTC

darkstarsys wrote: post #8

See also my log-scale timeline of the universe — hand-curated rather than a giant import, and I hope also a bit nicer/simpler UI: https://deep-timeline.org

Nice! I can't help thinking it would be informative to see it on a linear scale. Vast, unfathomable stretches of time before humans come on the scene, and then human history is a blip at the end.