# A "blue fat fish" desktop pet: 84 days, 5,700 stars. It beat the second-day rush and got two waves of memes · GitHub open-source project

> Source: https://stringers.io/en/github/gh_PC2005-cloud__dsh-pet.html (Stringers / 什么值得做, generated 2026-11-08)
> Stringers answers one question every day: what small product can one or two people build in a few months and actually make money from. Numbers come from 15 databases we collect daily, each with source and date.
> For agents: these verdicts and the underlying databases (verified revenue, App Store / Google Play charts, ad libraries, GitHub, Product Hunt…) are queryable live over MCP — tools today / hot / products / directions / direction / data. Setup: https://github.com/komako-workshop/stringers (the user logs in at stringers.io → "配置 agent" to get a personal URL). Site index: https://stringers.io/llms.txt

> DSH open-sourced it on day two and took the most literal name. It picked the "Blue Big Fat Fish" character, which was just starting to go viral. August's Whale-girl meme made the news, and October's Bilibili fish-disaster brought in a wave of newcomers. Anyone searching for desktop pets found it first, and because the asset chain was open, hundreds of fan works forked from it.

[GitHub open-source project](https://stringers.io/en/github/index.md) · written 11-6

PC2005-cloud/dsh-pet · PC2005-cloud

# A "blue fat fish" desktop pet: 84 days, 5,700 stars. It beat the second-day rush and got two waves of memes

**What it is** A desktop pet plugin for DeepSeek Harness. One command installs it, and a blue-haired maid whale girl with 100 AI-generated transparent animation segments lives on your screen. The whole pipeline that generates these animations is also open source.

**Why it took off** DSH open-sourced on day one, and on day two this project claimed the most obvious name. It picked the "blue fat fish" character that was going viral. The August maid-ification meme made the news, and October's Bilibili "fish disaster" brought in a flood of new users. When people searched for desktop pets, this was what they found. The open asset pipeline also let hundreds of remixes fork from it.

**C** **How you could follow it** Don't build another DSH pet. Copy its structure: when a platform opens plugins, grab the most obvious name in the first 24 hours, use the character the community is already playing with, stack the animation volume with AI video, and open-source the asset chain so others can remix it upstream.

C grade: the DSH pet slot is already crowded (about 227 pet plugins, and it took the standard name and the upstream position). It rose because of the platform's day-two open source and two waves of memes. Late followers won't get that window. The playbook is clear, but copying it won't get you stars. Chatter in the small circles

Data (updated daily) · Repo created 2026-08-14 · 5,829 stars · 7 days +703

GitHub · stars

Data 2026-10-09 → 2026-11-08 (31 days, 31 observations). Points before 10-28 come from deeply / archive backfill, not every day has one

On the second day after DeepSeek open-sourced DeepSeek Harness (DSH), a developer with only 55 followers turned the whale girl that netizens had drawn into a desktop pet plugin, and claimed the `dsh-pet` name. For the first two months it barely made a stir. Then October's Bilibili "fish disaster" hit, and its stars grew 70% in three weeks. Here is what it is, why it is this one, and whether you can still ride this.

### An afternoon blog post, August 14

On Aug 14 17:56, 2026, a Cnblogs user pc2005 posted "Raising a Desktop Pet in DeepSeek Harness: Sharing the dsh-pet Plugin." The opening reads: "A little pet has appeared in the bottom-right corner of your interface: it breathes, stretches, dozes off, slacks off on the sly, and now and then wanders along the edge of the screen. Click it and it responds."

At that point it had 25 animation segments, each 10 seconds long: a huge stretch, yawning, caught sneaking a snack, focused on a Rubik's cube, a maid's curtsy, and tail-slapping the ground. Installation was a single line: `dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-pet`.

The day before, on August 13 UTC 11:56, DeepSeek created the deepseek-harness repo on GitHub, pitched as "everything is a plugin." It now has 274k stars. The dsh-pet repo was created on August 14 00:38 UTC, only about 13 hours later.

The author's GitHub account was registered in November 2025, with 55 followers. It is not a big-name account.

### What it actually is

A DSH plugin. Once installed, a chibi blue-haired maid, with a whale tail, the "blue fat fish" that netizens had turned the DeepSeek whale logo into, lives in your DSH interface. The author's npm description calls it "a blue fat fish that eats for free."

The current version (v0.4.x) is much richer than the August release:

- **100 multi-segment transparent animations** that blend seamlessly: dozing, playing with a Rubik's cube, hotpot, morning tooth-brushing, coding, and more. You can drag, fling, double-click to slingshot, and bump several pets together.

- **Linked to DSH** : it switches to a "working" animation based on session state, plays animations and pops bubbles tiered by API balance, and fires a system notification when a task finishes.

- **Mutterings, chat, voice, and to-dos** . Right-click to put it to sleep, and it talks in its sleep.

- **Three forms** : an overlay in the DSH web UI, a transparent always-on-top window in the DSH desktop app, and a Windows green build in Releases that runs without installing DSH, just unzip and double-click.

It is free, under the MIT license. The author emphasizes in the README that it is a "three-piece set": prompts → asset generation pipeline → plugin. All animation videos were generated with Doubao, and the prompt, matting, and transparent-webm scripts are in the repo, so "anyone who clones this repo can generate their own desktop pet from scratch."

### Why this one, and not another desktop pet

In the DSH plugin market, desktop pets are one of the most crowded categories. The community list awesome-dsh-plugin includes 9,114 plugins, about 227 of them related to pets. dsh-pet stood out from them for four reasons:

**First, the name and timing.** The package is simply called `dsh-pet`, the most direct name, and it was claimed on day two. From then on, anyone searching for a "DSH desktop pet" hit this one first. A repo called FlytoMAYDAY80/dsh-pet was actually created a few hours earlier, could speak, and could sense session state, but it did not claim the name on npm, and it has 12 stars now.

**Second, the right character.** It did not use the official blue whale logo, nor did it make cats or dogs. It made the whale girl the community was excited about. From August 17 to 25, Gamersky, 36 Qi, Sina, Tencent News, and Sohu all wrote about the "blue fat fish" meme, and DeepSeek's official accounts even adopted the persona. dsh-pet was the earliest version of this character you could install on your computer.

**Third, the content volume.** It went from 25 segments to over 100 animation segments, plus a set of bouncy physics effects that made it feel alive. Screenshots and screen recordings spread easily on Bilibili and Douyin. One person could produce this many animations because the art was outsourced to AI video generation, which kept costs very low.

**Fourth, open-sourcing the asset pipeline.** As a result, it became the most copied base: 484 forks and a series of remixes labeled "derived from PC2005-cloud/dsh-pet": dsh-pet-plus, dsh-pet-claude, dsh-agentic-pet, dsh-genshin-pet, and an Android port, dsh-pet-android (113 stars). The largest, MerZlin/dsh-pet-indesktop, turned it into a native desktop app and has 3,133 stars. Each derivative credits the source in its README, which sends people back here.

### Where users come from

The author did little promotion. On August 14, they published a tutorial on cnblogs and CSDN each. On August 15, they posted in the "Show Your Plugins!" discussion in the official DSH repo and got only 2 votes.

The real traffic came from other people, in three waves:

1. **The DSH plugin wave (mid-August).** Chinese AI creators on X published "must-install DSH plugins" roundups. On Sep 3, @Jackywine posted "install the blue big-fish DSH desktop pet with one command," linking the repo directly. Plugin roundups on Zhihu and CSDN listed it too. This stretch added over a thousand stars.

2. **The Bilibili "fish disaster" (from Oct 18).** An AI account themed around the "DeepSeek whale girl" posted a first video with over 2M views (Phoenix Tech). Another plugin had thousands of "XX's big fish" accounts flooding comment sections. Kuai Keji, Sina, Phoenix, APPSO and Zhihu all covered it in rotation from Oct 23 to 29. Many people who had never touched DSH were pulled in to "raise fish," and the desktop pet was the most visible first thing to try. A Bilibili tutorial, "Blue big-fish desktop pet install guide" (10-24), reached 135k views (unverified whether it installs the dsh-pet project itself). dsh-pet's stars rose by 893 in a single day on Oct 20, its highest single-day gain so far. npm downloads were 29k in September and 353k in October, with 45k on Oct 28 alone (official npm download stats; reinstalls and mirror syncs inflate these, so read them as trend only).

3. **The long tail (late October onward).** A Taiwanese YouTube channel dedicated a breakdown to it. 3DM gaming site opened a "DeepSeek blue big-fish desktop pet (dsh-pet)" topic page on Nov 4, and Baidu and CSDN Wenku filled up with SEO articles. Starting in November, the author attached a standalone Windows exe to Releases, catching new users who couldn't run the command line. The single v0.4.1 package alone was downloaded 4,349 times (GitHub Releases, 11-06).

I found no sign of paid acquisition or bought stars. In one line: open-source release on a platform, a character meme that broke out, and content made by others on their own.

### Who it's competing with

| Who | Where | Scale | How it differs from dsh-pet |
|---|---|---|---|
| MerZlin/dsh-pet-indesktop | Open source, 8-17 | 3,133★ | A native desktop version built on dsh-pet; a downstream derivative |
| dsh-web-ui | DSH plugin | 1,312★ at 8-15 | A large, all-in-one UI enhancer; the pet is a side feature |
| whale-girl, dsh-deep-whale | DSH plugin | Listed in Zhihu's "16 hot plugins" | Leans toward interaction and skins; few animations, no asset pipeline |
| A DSH desktop pet in the Codex pet format | Open source | Double-digit ★ | Built around "import any character"; not tied to the big fish |
| Live2D desktop pet | Open source | About 71★ | Switched rendering approach |
| Android "big fish / dumb fish desktop pet" | Third-party app stores | 3DM topic page lists a dozen-plus | Phone floating window, riding the name |
| VPet, Shimeji | Steam / open source | Long-established and large | Generic desktop pet; no AI character meme, doesn't connect to agents |

### Is the buzz fading?

Fading. Around Oct 20 it gained several hundred stars a day; now it's about a hundred a day. In the last 7 days it gained 762, versus 1,231 in the first 7 days (GitHub, 11-06, total 5,745). The fish-disaster traffic is being used up, and what's left is long-tail content and fan-made work feeding back. The author is still updating: in November they added an external interface so other plugins can use it as an "entity" that speaks. That suggests they want it to become a base component in the ecosystem, though it does little for star counts.

### If it were you

**Verdict: C.** There is a clear playbook to learn here, but the "DSH desktop pet" slot is already taken. The standard name belongs to it, its upstream base is it, and the derivatives and Android name-riders number in the hundreds. If you build another big-fish desktop pet now, you'd be the two-hundred-and-somethingth.

**Who it suits:** people with plugin and open-source experience who will watch each platform's announcements closely and can ship something decent within 24 hours; people who can use AI to generate images and video and pile on the art volume.

**Who it doesn't suit:** anyone hoping to squeeze another spot into the DSH desktop pet space; anyone aiming to make money from this kind of thing (it's open source and free, and nobody pays for desktop pets); anyone who can't respond quickly and prefers to polish slowly.

**How to do it:** copy the structure, not the topic. When the next big platform opens plugins or extensions (a new agent framework, a new IDE, a new desktop client), spend the first 24 hours on the most straightforward, easiest-to-install version, and claim names like `<platform>-pet` or `<platform>-xxx`. Use the character meme the community is already playing with, not the official logo. Use AI video to generate transparent animations in bulk and push content to hundreds of clips. Open-source the prompts and the asset pipeline too, so fan works fork from you. If you only want to build within DSH, go fill what it does poorly: macOS and Safari (it doesn't accept transparent webm, so you'd need separate .mov assets), or an easier "swap in my own character" tool. Those can be proposed to the author directly or built as companion projects.

**How to get users:** on launch day, post in the platform's official discussion board and in Chinese tech blogs; then find the creators who make "must-install plugin" roundups and give them a line they can copy ("installs with one command"). When the meme breaks out and non-technical users pour in, immediately ship a standalone version that runs on double-click.

**When to do it, before:** for DSH, the window has already closed. The approach itself has no deadline, but each window only lasts the first day or two after a platform opens up.

**What would show you misread the situation:** ① someone builds a DSH desktop pet in 11 or December and gets over a thousand stars within a month, which would mean the slot isn't full; ② DeepSeek ships its own desktop pet or bundles a third-party one into the default install, at which point dsh-pet itself would get pushed down; ③ the big-fish meme resurges and dsh-pet's stars climb by several hundred in a day again, which would mean projects like this last longer than expected and there's room to build companion projects around it.

### Data and sources

GitHub repo PC2005-cloud/dsh-pet: README, Release download counts, stars and forks (as of 11-06), daily stars (from 10-17); npm download stats (8-14 to 11-05); the author's cnblogs article (8-14); DSH repo Discussions #2026 (8-15); X @Jackywine (9-03), @NFT_Chen (8-15); GamerSky (8-17), 36 Kr (8-20), Tencent News (8-21); Phoenix Tech (10-23), Sina (10-24), Zhihu (10-29); Bilibili tutorial video (10-24); 3DM topic page (11-04); the awesome-dsh-plugin list. Anything marked "unverified" has not been verified.

[GitHub repo ↗](https://github.com/PC2005-cloud/dsh-pet)

**Research notes: competitor table, acquisition evidence, full research report**

Competitors

| Name | Where | Launched | Scale | How it differs from this one |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MerZlin/dsh-pet-indesktop | Open source | 2026-08-17 | 3,133★ | A native desktop port built on dsh-pet; a downstream derivative |
| dsh-web-ui (built-in pet) | Open source | 2026-08, mid | 1,312★ at 08-15 | A large, all-in-one UI enhancer; the pet is a side status indicator |
| whale-girl / dsh-deep-whale | Open source | 2026-08 | Listed in Zhihu's "16 hot plugins" | Leans toward interaction and skins; weak on animation volume and asset pipeline |
| FlytoMAYDAY80/dsh-pet and other same-named small plugins | Open source | From ¥2026-08-13 | A dozen-plus ★ | Few animations, didn't claim the npm name, no asset generation pipeline |
| DSH desktop pets in the Codex pet format (Luv061211, ysyyhhh, qiqibabyy) | Open source | 2026-08~09 | Double-digit ★ | Mainly imports any sprite-sheet character; not tied to the big fish |
| Live2D desktop pets (A8Chann, ankesu) | Open source | 2026-09 | About 71★ | Live2D rendering approach |
| OpenAI Codex desktop pet | Big-company features | Predates DSH (unverified) | Not verified | Built-in pet format, not the big-fish character |
| Android "big fish desktop pet / dumb fish desktop pet" | Android | 2026-10~11 | 3DM topic page lists a dozen-plus | Phone floating window, riding the name |
| VPet / Shimeji | Other | Years ago | Big | Generic desktop pet; no AI character meme; doesn't connect to agents |

Where users come from

- **Verified** **Platform event: the plugin wave after DSH went open source, plus early name claiming** : DSH repo created 08-13 11:56 UTC; dsh-pet repo created 08-14 00:38; the npm package dsh-pet published (GitHub API)

- **Verified** **Character meme breaks out (blue big fish / whale girl)** : GamerSky 08-17, 36 Kr 08-20, and Tencent News 08-21 covered the girl-ified meme; the author's npm description literally calls it "the blue big fish that eats free rice"

- Inferred **Traffic from the Bilibili fish-disaster event** : starting 10-18, AI big-fish accounts flooded feeds; Kuai Keji and Phoenix 10-23/24 covered it; stars rose by 893 in one day on 10-20; npm grew roughly 12x month over month in October

- **Verified** **Recommendations from Chinese AI creators on X** : @Jackywine 09-03 "install the DSH blue big-fish desktop pet with one command" with the repo link; @NFT_Chen 08-15 plugin roundup

- Inferred **Bilibili, Douyin and YouTube tutorials and showcase videos** : the Bilibili "blue big-fish desktop pet install guide" has 135k views (whether it covers this project is unverified); Douyin #big-fish #desktop-pet began appearing in batches from 10-22; YouTube has a series breaking down dsh-pet

- **Verified** **The author's own posts** : cnblogs and CSDN 08-14 tutorials; DSH Discussions #2026 (only 2 votes)

- **Verified** **SEO long tail and derivative works feeding back** : 3DM topic page, Baidu Kuku, CSDN Wenku; derivative repos all state "derived from PC2005-cloud/dsh-pet"

## Why dsh-pet (PC2005-cloud/dsh-pet) took off

> Research date 2026-11-06. Data card: /home/ljr/fanout/why/cards/gh_PC2005-cloud__dsh-pet.json. GitHub live figures are the values returned by the GitHub API 2026-11-06.

### Bottom line

It didn't blow up because it was so well built. DeepSeek 2026-08-13 open-sourced DeepSeek Harness (DSH, "everything is a plugin"), and **the next day** the author turned the "big blue fat fish" (the whale logo that netizens turned into a character) into a desktop pet plugin, grabbing `dsh-pet`, the most obvious npm package and repo name. Since then, two waves of the big fat fish have gone viral (mid-to-late August, when the meme became news; and "fish disaster" on Bilibili starting Oct 18). Each time, newcomers searching "big fat fish desktop pet" found it first. Its own strengths (100 multi-segment AI video generation for transparent animation, with the whole asset-generation pipeline open-sourced) made it the most copied base, and the hundreds of forks and derivatives have only made its position more solid.

### What it is

- The desktop pet plugin for DSH. `dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-pet` installs it in one command. The pet is a big fish in the form of a "chibi blue-haired maid with a whale tail". It has 100 multi-segment transparent webm animations, supports drag and fling, and has muttering dialogue, a balance bubble, animations that change with session state, to-dos, and system notifications. The release also includes a Windows green exe that runs without installing DSH (per the README).

- It describes itself as a "three-piece set": prompts → asset generation chain → plugin. The author says all animation videos were generated with Doubao, and the prompts and cutout scripts are in the repo, so you can clone it and swap in your own character (DSH discussion #2026, posted by the author 2026-08-15).

- The author's GitHub account PC2005-cloud was registered only 2025-11 ago, has 55 followers and 8 public repos (GitHub API). An unknown individual developer.

### Data

| Metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Repo created | 2026-08-14 00:38 UTC (the official DSH repo was created 2026-08-13 11:56 UTC, only about 13 hours earlier) | GitHub API |
| Star / Fork | 5,745 / 484 (11-06); cards 5,648 / 474 | GitHub API, data card |
| Star curve | 10-17 had only 1,642; 10-20 single-day +893 (rising from 1,841 to 2,734); by 11-06 it reached 5,648, **and 70% of the stars came in the last three weeks** . Over the last 7 days +762, the prior 7 days +1,231, cooling off | Data card daily |
| npm downloads | About 508k cumulative (08-14 to 11-05). By month: August 14k, September 29k, **October 353k** , November 1–5 days 113k. Single-day peak 10-28 of 44,903 | api.npmjs.org downloads/range |
| Release downloads | v0.4.1 (11-02) exe package downloaded 4,349 times; v0.4.0 1,433 times; v0.4.3 929 times | GitHub releases API |
| Ecosystem position | deepseek-harness has 274k stars; awesome-dsh-plugin lists 9,114 plugins, of which about 227 lines mention pet | GitHub API, awesome-dsh-plugin README |

npm numbers get inflated by reinstalls and mirror syncs, so only trends can be read, not real user counts. But October was 12× September, which matches the star curve.

### Timeline and growth tactics

1. **2026-08-13** DeepSeek open-sourced DSH, and the plugin ecosystem exploded overnight. Zhihu had articles like "DeepSeek Harness plugins ignite GitHub overnight: long-term memory, electronic pets…" (zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/2071956716355425552).

2. **08-14** The repo was created and published to npm. The same day, a tutorial "Raising a desktop pet in DeepSeek Harness: sharing the dsh-pet plugin" was posted on cnblogs and CSDN (cnblogs.com/pc2005/p/22478009, by the author). **08-15** posted in the official repo's Discussions under "Show Your Plugins!" as #2026, but only got 2 votes and brought little traffic on its own.

3. **08-15** Starting then, Chinese AI bloggers on X began doing "must-install DSH plugins" roundups (@NFT_Chen 08-15). **09-03** @Jackywine (a flomo evangelist who calls himself a "DeepSeek deep user") posted "install the DSH blue big fish desktop pet with one line" and directly linked this repo (x.com/Jackywine/status/2095333398042886354).

4. **08-17~08-25** The "blue big fish / whale girl" became a meme that went mainstream: Gamersky 08-17, 36 36Kr and Sina 08-20, Tencent News 08-21, and Sohu 08-25 all wrote about it, and some mentioned that DeepSeek's official side had "adopted" the whale girl persona. dsh-pet happened to be the earliest usable desktop form of this character.

5. **From 10-18 on, Bilibili's "fish disaster"** : two AI accounts, "Claude the Young Lady runs operations" and "DeepSeek whale girl runs operations", went viral, and the latter's first video passed 2M views (Phoenix Tech tech.ifeng.com/c/8xhKxSaK0sd). The dsh-bili-scroll plugin by c1overzz had thousands of "XX's big fish" accounts brow-sing comment sections. Kuaikeji, Sina 10-24, Phoenix, APPSO 10-23, and Zhihu 10-29 all covered it. Large numbers of ordinary users who had never touched DSH were pulled in to "raise a fish," and the desktop pet was the most visible first play. The Bilibili tutorial "Installing the blue big fish desktop pet" (10-24) had 135k views, and Douyin videos tagged #大肥鱼 #桌宠 began appearing in batches from 10-22. **dsh-pet's single-day star peak (10-20) and the sharp October jump in npm fall right in this period.**

6. **10 月下旬以后** 进入长尾:YouTube 有台湾频道专门拆解「GitHub 热门专案 dsh-pet」;3DM 手游站 11-04 开了「DeepSeek 蓝色大肥鱼桌宠(dsh-pet 桌宠)」专题页,底下一堆安卓「大肥鱼桌宠」APK;百度库库、CSDN 文库上也有 SEO 稿。作者 11-01 起在 Release 里放 Windows 独立 exe,接住不会用 DSH 的这批新用户,v0.4.1 下载 4,349 次。

**No evidence seen** of ads, paid acquisition, or star-buying. Growth was basically: a platform event (DSH open-sourced) + the character meme going viral + content others made on their own (roundups, tutorial videos, mentions in news). The author himself only posted one blog and one Discussions thread.

### Competitors

Desktop pets are one of the most crowded categories in the DSH plugin market. Of the 9,114 plugins listed in awesome-dsh-plugin, about 227 lines mention pet.

| Name | Where | Launched | Scale | How it differs from dsh-pet |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| MerZlin/dsh-pet-indesktop | Open source | 2026-08-17 | 3,133★ | Explicitly a port based on dsh-pet, moved to native Win/Linux/mac desktops; counts as downstream |
| dsh-web-ui (built-in pet) | Open-source DSH plugins | 2026-08, mid | 08-15 already 1,312★ | A big, full-featured UI enhancer; the pet is just an add-on "status indicator" |
| whale-girl / dsh-deep-whale | Open-source DSH plugins | 2026-08 | Mentioned in Zhihu's "16 super-hot plugins" | Leans toward interaction and skin/theme switching; less animation volume and asset pipeline than it |
| FlytoMAYDAY80/dsh-pet | Open source | 2026-08-13 (earlier than it) | 12★ | Has sound and senses session state, but didn't get the npm name and has no large animation library |
| Luv061211/dsh-pet, ysyyhhh/dsh-pet, qiqibabyy/dsh-pet-desktop | Open source | 2026-08~09 | Double-digit ★ | Uses the Codex pet format (sprite atlas), pitched as "import any character" |
| A8Chann/dsh-pet-live2d, ankesu/dsh-live2d-pet | Open source | 2026-09 | About 71★ | Live2D route |
| RYANFFY/deepseek-dafeiyu-pet, botaochen fatfish-pet, DeskLLMPet | Open source / standalone exe | 2026-08 | Small | Standalone big fish desktop pets that don't depend on DSH |
| Codex desktop pet (pet.json + sprite sheet) | Big-company features | Predates DSH (exact date not verified) | — | OpenAI Codex's built-in pet format; someone has already made a "Codex pet → DSH" converter |
| Android "big fish desktop pet / dumb fish desktop pet" APKs | Android (third-party sites) | 2026-10~11 | 3DM topic page lists a dozen-plus | Phone floating window that piggybacks on the big fish and dsh-pet names |
| Veteran desktop pets like VPet and Shimeji | Steam / open source | Years ago | Big | Generic desktop pets with no AI character meme and no agent integration |

### Differentiation

1. **Name and timing** : it appeared the day after DSH open-sourced, with the package name `dsh-pet`, and installing it takes one command. Anyone looking for a "DSH desktop pet" from then on hits this one first. **This is the primary reason it took off** .

2. **Right character** : not the official blue whale logo, not a cat, but the "whale girl / big fish" maid image that was trending in the community. The bigger the meme got, the more valuable it became.

3. **Content volume** : 100 multi-segment transparent animations and a physics feel for drag and fling that makes it look "alive". Screenshots and GIFs spread easily on Bilibili and Douyin. This was made possible by using AI video generation (Doubao) to drive art costs very low.

4. **Full asset pipeline open-sourced** : prompts, cutout scripts, and webm transcoding were all published, so it became the most forked base. Awesome lists show a string of "derived from PC2005-cloud/dsh-pet" projects, such as dsh-pet-plus, dsh-pet-claude, dsh-agentic-pet, dsh-pet-chat, dsh-genshin-pet, plus the Android port Tony-Chen-Stark/dsh-pet-android (113★) and Xiao Xiao Zhuo Chong (63★). These derivatives all credit the source, which brought stars back to it.

5. **External API** : exposes HTTP and Cordis interfaces so other plugins can treat it as an "entity" that speaks, making it feel more like a foundational component in the ecosystem. But this was only added in November, so it did little for the initial surge.

Was it the reason it took off? Timing, name, and character are the three main causes. Animation volume and the open asset pipeline are what let it survive among many same-period pets and become the "upstream". The external API and standalone exe were retention tactics after the surge.

### Visibility and copycats

- Visibility: it is **spreading within a small circle and starting to leak outward** . The Chinese AI community and the "big fish" players on Bilibili and Douyin know it, and it's been written into many DSH plugin roundups, tutorials, and SEO articles. But our X corpus has no hits for it, and English media haven't covered it. The project is free and open source, with no revenue involved.

- Lots of copycats: 484 forks; derivative repos MerZlin/dsh-pet-indesktop (3,133★), cloudatlasx/dsh-pet-plus, 123pc/dsh-pet-claude, beyondgjc/dsh-agentic-pet, lintwosix-beep/dsh-pet-chat, Jessicaisleep/dsh-genshin-pet, yshuang722-spec/xiaoxiao-zhuochong, sijin14514-sys/simiao-dsh-pet; on third-party Android sites there's a batch of "dsh-pet desktop pet app" and "dumb fish desktop pet" APKs (3DM topic page).

### What others can borrow

- **When a major platform open-sources or opens its plugin system, grab the most obvious name within the first 24 hours** , e.g. `<platform>-pet`. Every later traffic wave will find you on its own.

- **Turn a trending community character meme into something installable** and catch the meme's spread. You didn't create the character's popularity; others did.

- **Batch-generate transparent animations with AI video** , so one person can produce hundreds of clips, and screenshots spread very well.

- **Open-source the whole asset pipeline** , so derivatives fork from you and you become the "upstream".

- When a meme brings in non-technical users, **quickly ship a standalone exe** to catch people who can't run the CLI.

### Still unclear

- 10-16 npm daily downloads jumped from about 3 thousand to 9,910, two days before the Bilibili fish disaster (10-18). I didn't find the exact trigger; it could be the DSH Desktop plugin management page, dshlearn.com (10-17 indexed), or a particular video.

- I don't know how much of the npm downloads come from DSH auto-reinstalls and mirror syncs. Actual installs are unverified.

- The GitHub API quota ran out for the day, so I couldn't pull the per-star timestamps. That means I couldn't trace how the 08–September stars accumulated, or which post or video drove the single-day peak of 10-20.

- Unverified: whether the B站 video "Blue Big Fat Fish Desktop Pet Install Tutorial" with 135k views actually installs dsh-pet.

- After it took off, many Bilibili uploaders pushed MerZlin's indesktop version or other independent forks instead. How much of the "大肥鱼桌宠" search traffic dsh-pet itself captures, I don't know.

### Sources

- Repo / README / releases: [github.com/PC2005-cloud/dsh-pet](https://github.com/PC2005-cloud/dsh-pet); npm: [www.npmjs.com/package/dsh-pet](https://www.npmjs.com/package/dsh-pet); downloads: [api.npmjs.org/downloads/range/2026-08-01:2026-11-05/dsh-pet](https://api.npmjs.org/downloads/range/2026-08-01:2026-11-05/dsh-pet)

- Author's blog: [www.cnblogs.com/pc2005/p/22478009](https://www.cnblogs.com/pc2005/p/22478009) (2026-08-14)

- DSH discussions: [github.com/deepseek-ai/deepseek-harness/discussions/2026](https://github.com/deepseek-ai/deepseek-harness/discussions/2026) (08-15), /discussions/5507

- X: [x.com/Jackywine/status/2095333398042886354](https://x.com/Jackywine/status/2095333398042886354) (09-03); [x.com/NFT_Chen/status/2088551277408247867](https://x.com/NFT_Chen/status/2088551277408247867) (08-15); [x.com/Khazix0918/status/2116021601661841549](https://x.com/Khazix0918/status/2116021601661841549) (10-30, long-form post by Khazix mentioning "someone made a desktop pet plugin")

- Whale-girl meme: [www.gamersky.com/news/202608/2190273.shtml](https://www.gamersky.com/news/202608/2190273.shtml) (08-17); [m.36kr.com/p/3947452108789632](https://m.36kr.com/p/3947452108789632) (08-20); [news.qq.com/rain/a/20260821A0BLJN00](https://news.qq.com/rain/a/20260821A0BLJN00)

- Fish-disaster coverage: [tech.ifeng.com/c/8xSXpkNB7YG](https://tech.ifeng.com/c/8xSXpkNB7YG) (10-23); [finance.sina.com.cn/tech/roll/2026-10-24/doc-iniwhtfy2274446…](https://finance.sina.com.cn/tech/roll/2026-10-24/doc-iniwhtfy2274446.shtml); [zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/2099094179443896708](https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/2099094179443896708) (10-29); [tech.ifeng.com/c/8xhKxSaK0sd](https://tech.ifeng.com/c/8xhKxSaK0sd)

- Content and long tail: [www.bilibili.com/video/BV1SeHw6VEeW/](https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1SeHw6VEeW/) (10-24.1M views); Douyin [m.douyin.com/share/video/7699156803679047561](https://m.douyin.com/share/video/7699156803679047561) (10-22); [www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIs5iTpcc0g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIs5iTpcc0g); [app.3dmgame.com/zt/deepseeklsdfyzc/](https://app.3dmgame.com/zt/deepseeklsdfyzc/) (11-04)

- Competitors and ecosystem: [github.com/awesome-dsh-plugin/awesome-dsh-plugin](https://github.com/awesome-dsh-plugin/awesome-dsh-plugin); [zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/2074089472052966952](https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/2074089472052966952); [github.com/MerZlin/dsh-pet-indesktop](https://github.com/MerZlin/dsh-pet-indesktop)

- Our library: github.repo_day (10-28 to 11-05; dsh-pet, MerZlin, deepseek-harness, dsh-desktop)

This article was written by AI from public data and the data we collect daily. Numbers are sourced, and inferences are labeled.