Hourly Kitten

• Fediverse: @hourlykitten@botsin.space

The Hourly Kitten service aims to provide you with one properly attributed, Creative Commons licensed, and mind-numbingly adorable kitten image, once an hour, on the hour.

Hourly Kitten was originally created by Dan and Jeremy Bornstein — Dan's idea, Jeremy's code, Dan's kitten curation — over the course of a few days in May and June of 2014. It started as a Twitter bot. It was ported to the Fediverse in November of 2022. As of mid-2023, the Twitter bot stopped working due to adverse actions by the folks that run Twitter.

The impetus for the account was that Dan's previous favorite Twitter source of kittens started posting way too many commercial links. Dan likes kittens, and particularly found that he likes using pictures of kittens as a way to punctuate his social feed (helping him not lose his place when trying to consume his feed in toto). So, he wanted to have a better source of kittens, with a reasonably memorable (and stately) pace. And he didn't want to rely on anyone else anymore. Thus, the project was born.

Kitten curation is an ongoing activity. It takes approximately one minute (amortized) to pick, acquire, and properly document each image. So, in order to have a full year's worth of un-repeated images (24 * 365 = 8,760 images), it would take about 146 hours. That's equivalent to a full-time job (of 40 hours per week) for about a month. Suffice it to say that there are many fewer images in the kittenbase than that; however, we aspire to keep up with the curation such that you won't get tired of the selection, and that you will always have at least a few new images to look forward to seeing every day.

PLEASE NOTE: Kitten curation has been on hiatus since around the start of 2020, because [gestures around]. We hope to get back to it soon but can make no promises. But FWIW, here is the official submission procedure, should curation ramp up again.

Submissions

Do you have (access to) a cute kitten who needs more exposure on social media? If so, here are the steps to follow:

1. Take pictures of the little scamp.
2. Upload them to any well-known image hosting site which provides clear authorship attribution of images. For example, Flickr is a good choice. As a counterexample, Imgur is a bad choice because they don't provide solid authorship attribution.
3. Mark the pictures as being licensed under a Creative Commons license that allows sharing and commercial use. (Why commercial? Because we're being conservative in what we accept. We do not intend to "monetize" Hourly Kitten.) The CC BY 4.0 license works, for example.
4. Send mail to hourlykitten@murtbo.com, with the subject line "Submission," and include a link to your pictures.

Hourly Kitten is strictly an off-hours project, so it may take a while for your pictures to get included. Dan looks at each picture, and he may not accept yours. (Sorry.)

Beyond licensing, here are the basic criteria:

• The picture is primarily of one or more kittens, yearling or younger.
• It is an unadulterated, or only mildly manipulated, photograph.
• It's an aesthetically pleasing composition.
• It's cute / twee / squee-worthy.
• There aren't many (or any) non-kitten creatures in the picture.
• There's no "meme text."

Thanks in advance for your submissions!