MeowMeowBeenz: A Community Joke, Built for Real on atproto

There's an episode of Community — Season 5, Episode 8, "App Development and Condiments" — where Greendale gets hooked on an app called MeowMeowBeenz. The premise is simple: everyone rates everyone else from 1 to 5, chaos ensues and Greendale becomes a dystopian mess until the emergence of a mustard-faced savior.

So, naturally, I built it. Meet MeowMeowBeenz — the worst social network ever conceived, now lovingly recreated as a real, working thing you can actually use. Everyone gets a number from 1 to 5. That's it. That's the network. It's live at meowmeowbeenz.net, the code lives at tangled.org/dwot.com/meowmeowbeenz, and it's built on the AT Protocol — the open network behind Bluesky — entirely for the fun of it.

A number from 1 to 5

If you've seen the episode, the rules need no explaining. If you haven't: you log in, you rate people, people rate you, and everyone's scores roll up into a single average that becomes their entire personality. Hit a 5 and you're a "True 5," beloved and untouchable. Settle into a 4 and you're "Upper Beenz." A 3 is "Solid Mid." Drop to a 2 and you're "Lower Beenz," and below that, well — rate responsibly, you 5s.

Here's the genuinely sinister part, and the detail the show absolutely nails: not all votes are equal. Your rating is a weighted average, so a thumbs-up from a 5 is worth vastly more than one from a 2. The people at the top don't just enjoy their status — they control everyone else's. The rich get richer, the powerful anoint their friends, and the whole thing quietly calcifies into the hierarchy it claims to merely measure. It is a five-minute sitcom gag that accidentally describes every status economy in human history, and I find it deeply funny that I could reproduce society's downfall in a weekend.

Built on atproto, for no good reason

I could have thrown this together with a database and a weekend's worth of regret. Instead I built it on the AT Protocol — the same open network that powers Bluesky — because if you're going to recreate a fictional dystopia, you may as well do it on decentralized infrastructure that nobody can take away from you.

What that actually means for you, the prospective 5: you log in with your existing Bluesky handle (yourname.bsky.social works fine — no new account, no password for me to lose), and every rating you hand out gets stored in your data, not mine. In MeowMeowBeenz terms, the beenz you dish out are yours. They live in your corner of the network, they're signed by you, and if this whole silly site disappears tomorrow, your ratings survive. The app is just a window onto public data — it doesn't own anything.

If you want the nuts and bolts — the lexicon, how ratings get written and indexed, the leaderboard math — it's all open source and MIT licensed over on Tangled. Speaking of which…

Living on Tangled

This is also the first project I'm hosting on Tangled, a git platform that's itself built on atproto. There's something pleasingly recursive about an atproto app living in an atproto-native code forge. If you want to poke at the source, file an issue, or just admire the machinery behind the downfall of polite society, it's all at tangled.org/dwot.com/meowmeowbeenz.

Give it a try

Head to meowmeowbeenz.net, log in with your Bluesky handle, and start handing out beenz. Rate your friends. Rate your enemies. Watch the leaderboard sort everyone into a class system in real time and feel slightly worse about humanity. It's a joke that builds itself.

And look — Community rules. So where's our damn movie, huh? Rate responsibly, you 5s.