> The goal wasn't to build another social network.
> It was to bring back a small feeling that the web used to have: the sense that there are actual people on the other side of the screen.
> Town Square is intentionally tiny and forgetful. There are no accounts, no profiles, no follower counts, no permanent chat history. Messages exist only while people are there to read them.
Cute idea! But maybe this is just me having a different experience, but people having accounts/permanence was one of the defining “old web” feelings people keep talking about. A few people that were always in comment threads, or people with their own blogs linking back to you etc. People didn’t have the sign guestbooks with the same info every time, but they would anyway because they’re building up a persona. I get that you don’t want any social-media-y popularity contests, but… that is sort of what the web 30+ years ago was like.
I'm actually thinking about implementing some sort of "permanence" for some people, specially for recurring visitors of a given site.
But that's still an early thought.
I hope sites that just provide a way for people to assemble offline will be the new thing soon.
A photography guide's site that rallies amateurs for walk tours. A planning board for a foreign language practice group. A site with a schedule and registration form for a sports event.
When I read "online social" my head thinks "not-really social".
I'm working on a game that helps with this. You leave your little bunker in a post-apocalyptic world and find the land around you contaminated. You walk, run, any workout, to claim territory around you, and gain energy you can use to clean up. You start building greenhouses to grow food and start rebuilding the ecosystem. It's all on the real world map underneath you, and all the interactions between people in the game are cooperative: you get more benefits helping another player with most actions than doing the same thing in your own territory.
The game tricks you into going for walks or runs regularly since you need those energy points for everything, and I'm building out more cooperative behaviors to give you reasons to go walk with someone else, go work together to fight an alien infestation, and more. You'll discover other players in the game who are near you in the physical world, and be able to request help, thank them, give them benefits, all positive.
I've learned a lot from Niantic's strategy, but they've never leaned into actually helping people improve their fitness, or work out together. I'm hoping I can help solve this problem you're talking about, at least for getting people fitter!
mom&pop social media is the old thing, and like other mom&pop things that got steamrolled by their equivalents of Walmart, it is highly unlikely to ever return.
95% of people choose utility and convenience over ideological preferences, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. I too miss the old Internet sometimes, sure, but I'm not ashamed to admit that I'd much rather deal with anonymous strangers or LLMs than ye olde phpbbs with their anal moderation, resident schizos, and weird cliques.
I don't like this argument because it assumes that money should rightfully dictate everything in our lives. Also disagree that there is a "choice" when it comes to consumer spending, as if there are any public options for consumer spending in a neoliberal economy.
If you’re into running, cycling, etc. Strava can easily function in this way and does. I’ve made a bunch of friends and been introduced to groups and routes through my interaction with initial strangers
Well, most platforms operate primarily as an algorithmic scroll based feed, and the actual utilities (like event planning, or marketplace) are related to second class citizens – used mostly as a hook to get you to stay logged in.
I've had a lot of success lately relying exclusively on Partiful as my one social app. I know it's nearly an inevitability though before they will need to monetize and introduce some way to ruin the elegance.
(My proposal for the modern successor to Zawinski's law: Every social media platform attempts to expand until it has a scroll-based algorithmic content feed).
Fun fact. My wife and I met on something similar in 2006 or so. "My Blog Log" was a sidebar widget that showed other people who we reading that blog. She was in marketing, I was in tech, and it was a blog at that intersection written by Rex Hammock (RIP).
Not sure how this is appealing at all. I see a bunch of stick figures moving rapidly and comments flashing too quickly to read. I gave up as it wasn't obvious at all what to do or how to particpate.
The issue is that my site right now is too crowded giving this post reached a good position on HN.
On regular days, this are much calmer.
You can check other sites using the Townsquare on https://townsquare.cauenapier.com/ (fixed link).
Check out the map.
I had found it on StumbleUpon. We'd log in with friends and just fly around, explore, punch each other, chat with random people across the world on a surprisingly fluid multiplayer setting that was built to promote a web advertising agency (if I remember correctly).
It was really ahead of its time. The old internet was so fun.
This is pretty cool. I clicked on the demo but unfortunately it's already running into the inevitable issue of anonymous people typing out slurs and expletives. Maybe have a predefined set of words/phrases people can use?
All they can do is use morse code to communicate, even the names are assigned automatically. There is a zone map with hundreds of zones, zones with recent activity get a red hue. Secret zones can be unlocked if you happen to use one of the sekrit morse code words.
It's a casual mmorpg/townsquare that is fundamentally safe since the best you can do is focus to type a very offensive word in 20 seconds.
I stumbled upon some random people who visited the site as I was developing it. Taught some the words to enter the secret zones as a game, took them on a tour. Also met a morse code aficionado and we had a little conversation in morse code, eventually met him in another site I have.
I love it, and I just want to say thanks for making this and releasing it. I jumped through the indieweb webring and already stumbled onto another site using it too. Despite what some others have said about the lack of permanence, this still feels like an old web treasure to me even if it didn't exist.
This is the kind of fruit that vibe coding brings! A quick little fun idea that you can just whip up and try out! Without vibe coating it might have just been an idea that got put on a list of ideas and never got to be tried out.
And now it's an open source repo that other people can try out and fork it and see what works and sticks!
The best social media site I ever belonged to was one that required real names and proof before being allowed to log in. It was for professional and semi-professional in a industry I won't name. The friendliest, most helpful group I've ever known. Arguments were rare. Never any spam or totally weird/stupid posts. Always on point.
I swear I have nothing to do with it... :sweat
Specially because they get lot's of attention specially when I can't be on the computer and I lose all the fun!
Question for the developer, have you played the Playstation video game Journey?
The spoiler about it is, that while you adventure from one end of the land to another, and you encounter other sort of people looking players, it turns out that those are actually people and, at the end of the game you get a credits roll list with the PlayStation Network handles for each of the players that you encountered. There is no communication other than moving your character. It's delightful.
Anyhow, that subtle engagement is in my opinion quite valuable.
Reminds me of m favorite late 90s messenger, Odigo[0]. It had some sort of radar which showed you people who were visiting the same site. It sure had this town hall feel, but admittedly most sites were simply empty.
Personally, all the animations of stick figures moving and jumping is slightly annoying and offers little valuable information. I might enjoy something like showing a person's national flag (for where they are logged in from), or a timer for how long they've been on the site. Instead of the "street" metaphor for the graphic (benches, trees), maybe a Mercator Projection that locates an emoji at each person's location.
Really cool idea that I'd be reluctant to enable for any of my sites because I assume that it would just be used for people to be awful.
Maybe I'm just still traumatized by Playstation Home? A group of my friends all got Playstation 3s together, and we all decided to try Playstation Home, a town square for people to meet. The group met up and then spent the next few minutes being accosted by one a-hole after another.
Or maybe it's the github issue I had to delete today because of someone being a big, giant jerk.
TBF: I went to this town square and people were civilized, so maybe there is some hope for humanity. ;-)
I still hope for humanity :)
I believe in it! We just neeed to ignore the idiot ones that just want to draw attention to them selves.
Anyway...Right now it's just crowded because of the Hn post.
But usually it's much calmer, friendlier and interesting.
I've already had a lot of interesting conversation there :)
The last time it was dead, maybe 1 or 2 people wandered in and then went to Zzz.
Today it's got tons of people but a lack of moderation. I'm not really sure how you have a meaningful conversation either (maybe it's just because too many people are on there).
took a spin, pretty cool. Does it record convos? As a site owner, I would want to know what people were chatting up. As a web surfer, I like the anonymity of it.
I've just finished implementing a telegram plugin to it, so you can get notifications when people are chatting there. :)
Reach out if you wanna know more.
People in a town square still have identities. They are just likely to not know each other.
I think this is a significant part of a great idea. What it, and most/all other communication software is missing, is the ability to continue a conversation into a new context. It would be great to move a convo from the public square into a shop, then maybe share contact info to get together another day.
That is actualy giving some interesting ideas.
I'm now thinking about permanent identities across websites, as well as some "rooms" where you can enter to have a chat...
I'll need to think this through. I don;t want to overcomplicate the project...Part of charm is the simplicity.
An identity doesn't need to be more than a public gpg key. Anything else is just what they (or anyone, really) say about themselves relative to a given subject.
> People in a town square still have identities. They are just likely to not know each other.
I think that entirely depends on the size of the town. For a big city this is absolutely true, but in a small village you would expect to find at least a few familiar faces.
Now this is cool! I'd love to see something like it on most web pages as a way to interact with like-minded people... but then I start thinking about all the ways it's going to be abused and get sad.
I'm the site author and creator of TownSquare.
The only moment it got a bit abused it was during the first HN spike. But before and after that, everything was friendly.
Love this idea and your creation of it. Unfortunately do think the parent's concerns are valid - at this moment on your site at least one person has set their name to something offensive so it shows up perpetually (under the street light). Anonymity+connectivity persists in bringing out the worst of our impulses, I guess...
Do you think names are really necessary? Or could they take some other form than text, perhaps unicode chars chosen from a selection of abstract shapes? The wonderful https://www.tunera.xyz/fonts/teranoptia/ comes to mind.
I'm actually thinking about implementing some sort of "permanence" for some people, specially for recurring visitors of a given site. But that's still an early thought.
Would that be a little guy permanently on the page even if the user isn’t present, or a permanent persona for a user across visits?
A permanent persona for a user across visits. Could even be across website visits, if they all use townsquare.
go further and let me have the same persona in townsquares across various sites. or have you already described why you wouldn't want to do that?
I hope sites that just provide a way for people to assemble offline will be the new thing soon.
A photography guide's site that rallies amateurs for walk tours. A planning board for a foreign language practice group. A site with a schedule and registration form for a sports event.
When I read "online social" my head thinks "not-really social".
I'm working on a game that helps with this. You leave your little bunker in a post-apocalyptic world and find the land around you contaminated. You walk, run, any workout, to claim territory around you, and gain energy you can use to clean up. You start building greenhouses to grow food and start rebuilding the ecosystem. It's all on the real world map underneath you, and all the interactions between people in the game are cooperative: you get more benefits helping another player with most actions than doing the same thing in your own territory.
The game tricks you into going for walks or runs regularly since you need those energy points for everything, and I'm building out more cooperative behaviors to give you reasons to go walk with someone else, go work together to fight an alien infestation, and more. You'll discover other players in the game who are near you in the physical world, and be able to request help, thank them, give them benefits, all positive.
I've learned a lot from Niantic's strategy, but they've never leaned into actually helping people improve their fitness, or work out together. I'm hoping I can help solve this problem you're talking about, at least for getting people fitter!
Ping me when you're ready for Android/web users :)
This sounds awesome! I’d love to playtest it when you’re ready.
I appreciate you! I'll come back here and comment soon. :)
Link if I want to stay updated? Sounds cool
Sure! I'm not quite ready to testflight. I'll reply to your comment when I've got a page up. :)
Meetup used to be that until they got greedy and started charging everyone. It collapsed very quickly after that. It's a ghost town now.
I tried that, and started with the cheaper host option.
My meetups rapidly filled up with fake people, so real people couldn't sign up ... unless ... I signed up for the more expensive plan.
I gave up on it as a scam, at that point.
Yeah, the internet was originally an extension of the real world, and it probably should have stayed that way.
mom&pop social media is the old thing, and like other mom&pop things that got steamrolled by their equivalents of Walmart, it is highly unlikely to ever return.
95% of people choose utility and convenience over ideological preferences, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. I too miss the old Internet sometimes, sure, but I'm not ashamed to admit that I'd much rather deal with anonymous strangers or LLMs than ye olde phpbbs with their anal moderation, resident schizos, and weird cliques.
I don't like this argument because it assumes that money should rightfully dictate everything in our lives. Also disagree that there is a "choice" when it comes to consumer spending, as if there are any public options for consumer spending in a neoliberal economy.
Ironically in real life most offline activities of these kinds that I know of are facilitated on Facebook groups.
If you’re into running, cycling, etc. Strava can easily function in this way and does. I’ve made a bunch of friends and been introduced to groups and routes through my interaction with initial strangers
That already exists. It's called social media and people promote real life events there.
Well, most platforms operate primarily as an algorithmic scroll based feed, and the actual utilities (like event planning, or marketplace) are related to second class citizens – used mostly as a hook to get you to stay logged in.
I've had a lot of success lately relying exclusively on Partiful as my one social app. I know it's nearly an inevitability though before they will need to monetize and introduce some way to ruin the elegance.
(My proposal for the modern successor to Zawinski's law: Every social media platform attempts to expand until it has a scroll-based algorithmic content feed).
Fun fact. My wife and I met on something similar in 2006 or so. "My Blog Log" was a sidebar widget that showed other people who we reading that blog. She was in marketing, I was in tech, and it was a blog at that intersection written by Rex Hammock (RIP).
Not sure how this is appealing at all. I see a bunch of stick figures moving rapidly and comments flashing too quickly to read. I gave up as it wasn't obvious at all what to do or how to particpate.
The issue is that my site right now is too crowded giving this post reached a good position on HN.
On regular days, this are much calmer. You can check other sites using the Townsquare on https://townsquare.cauenapier.com/ (fixed link). Check out the map.
Maybe add some geolocation filter for higher number of users? For example, limit number of people to 10 based on closest location
Pretty anti-internet idea IMO
I miss when the Internet was truly global.
I guess for Town Square - if you mean it literally as in locally sure - but otherwise, massively limits the potential of this project.
Ohhh...that's an interesting idea!!! I'll put that on the roadmap, thanks!!!
I can't open that link. seems like no DNS records associated with the site?
sorry! Wrong Link
It's https://townsquare.cauenapier.com/
If it was anything like it is now, you really don't want to be reading these comments.
Reminds me of the old ff0000, sadly no longer active, but this is what it looked like: https://www.reddit.com/r/lost_websites/comments/11lao71/ff00...
I had found it on StumbleUpon. We'd log in with friends and just fly around, explore, punch each other, chat with random people across the world on a surprisingly fluid multiplayer setting that was built to promote a web advertising agency (if I remember correctly).
It was really ahead of its time. The old internet was so fun.
Previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48608570
Really love the idea!
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48608570 - June 2026 (166 comments)
This is pretty cool. I clicked on the demo but unfortunately it's already running into the inevitable issue of anonymous people typing out slurs and expletives. Maybe have a predefined set of words/phrases people can use?
This is the demo page for others to see: https://townsquare.cauenapier.com/#square
Some months ago I made this Morse Code Universe where people travel through zones, stumble upon each other, and communicate in morse code.
https://mall.merkoba.com/
All they can do is use morse code to communicate, even the names are assigned automatically. There is a zone map with hundreds of zones, zones with recent activity get a red hue. Secret zones can be unlocked if you happen to use one of the sekrit morse code words.
It's a casual mmorpg/townsquare that is fundamentally safe since the best you can do is focus to type a very offensive word in 20 seconds.
I stumbled upon some random people who visited the site as I was developing it. Taught some the words to enter the secret zones as a game, took them on a tour. Also met a morse code aficionado and we had a little conversation in morse code, eventually met him in another site I have.
I love it, and I just want to say thanks for making this and releasing it. I jumped through the indieweb webring and already stumbled onto another site using it too. Despite what some others have said about the lack of permanence, this still feels like an old web treasure to me even if it didn't exist.
thanks for that message! I made this for the community and this type of response makes me super happy!
This is the kind of fruit that vibe coding brings! A quick little fun idea that you can just whip up and try out! Without vibe coating it might have just been an idea that got put on a list of ideas and never got to be tried out.
And now it's an open source repo that other people can try out and fork it and see what works and sticks!
I love it!
The best social media site I ever belonged to was one that required real names and proof before being allowed to log in. It was for professional and semi-professional in a industry I won't name. The friendliest, most helpful group I've ever known. Arguments were rare. Never any spam or totally weird/stupid posts. Always on point.
There are 6 (!) posts about this in the last 15 days, can we not let it rest a bit?
I swear I have nothing to do with it... :sweat Specially because they get lot's of attention specially when I can't be on the computer and I lose all the fun!
I love the idea but all I’m seeing is people saying really explicative things. Hopefully there are better ways of moderating
Question for the developer, have you played the Playstation video game Journey?
The spoiler about it is, that while you adventure from one end of the land to another, and you encounter other sort of people looking players, it turns out that those are actually people and, at the end of the game you get a credits roll list with the PlayStation Network handles for each of the players that you encountered. There is no communication other than moving your character. It's delightful.
Anyhow, that subtle engagement is in my opinion quite valuable.
Noo...I never played it and didn't know about it! I'll check it out.
Reminds me of m favorite late 90s messenger, Odigo[0]. It had some sort of radar which showed you people who were visiting the same site. It sure had this town hall feel, but admittedly most sites were simply empty.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odigo_Messenger
i remember our 90s ISP advertising the use of PowWow[0] as a way to surf the web with other people. I never used it, but it seemed like a fun idea
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowWow_(chat_program)
This is so much fun! Thanks for making this!
You are welcome! My hope was that people had fun and had interesting conversation.
The second part only happens after the HN spike...ehhehe
In 2001, there was this browser extention showing "walking people" on the webfrontend and you could connect to them
Pure fun. Love it.
Thaaanks! That's the idea! Fun and meet random people.
The experience is quite different from HN spike....but usually is calmer and friendlier.
Must be nice to be able to take seriously the idea that multiple people might be browsing your site simultaneously… :(
Personally, all the animations of stick figures moving and jumping is slightly annoying and offers little valuable information. I might enjoy something like showing a person's national flag (for where they are logged in from), or a timer for how long they've been on the site. Instead of the "street" metaphor for the graphic (benches, trees), maybe a Mercator Projection that locates an emoji at each person's location.
Oh, my sweet summer child...
Really cool idea that I'd be reluctant to enable for any of my sites because I assume that it would just be used for people to be awful.
Maybe I'm just still traumatized by Playstation Home? A group of my friends all got Playstation 3s together, and we all decided to try Playstation Home, a town square for people to meet. The group met up and then spent the next few minutes being accosted by one a-hole after another.
Or maybe it's the github issue I had to delete today because of someone being a big, giant jerk.
TBF: I went to this town square and people were civilized, so maybe there is some hope for humanity. ;-)
I still hope for humanity :) I believe in it! We just neeed to ignore the idiot ones that just want to draw attention to them selves.
Anyway...Right now it's just crowded because of the Hn post. But usually it's much calmer, friendlier and interesting. I've already had a lot of interesting conversation there :)
Hmm idk, this looks a bit more like serendipity for vitriolic trolls
Well, as I said before. This is usually much calmer. Try coming back some time later, after the Hn spike.
or explore other people's websites that are using Townsquare. Check them out here https://townsquare.cauenapier.com/map
The last time it was dead, maybe 1 or 2 people wandered in and then went to Zzz.
Today it's got tons of people but a lack of moderation. I'm not really sure how you have a meaningful conversation either (maybe it's just because too many people are on there).
kinda similar to the bullet comments flying through screen on the chinese youtube Bilibili
cool idea, but the experience was not great. All I see are stick figures rapidly moving back and forth spouting racial slurs
took a spin, pretty cool. Does it record convos? As a site owner, I would want to know what people were chatting up. As a web surfer, I like the anonymity of it.
I've just finished implementing a telegram plugin to it, so you can get notifications when people are chatting there. :) Reach out if you wanna know more.
Would be great as an overlay for a livestream.
I'll check what I need to do to make it happen!!! If you stream and want to use it, please reach out! you can find my email on my site!
This is awesome
thaaanks :)
Fun!
People in a town square still have identities. They are just likely to not know each other.
I think this is a significant part of a great idea. What it, and most/all other communication software is missing, is the ability to continue a conversation into a new context. It would be great to move a convo from the public square into a shop, then maybe share contact info to get together another day.
That is actualy giving some interesting ideas. I'm now thinking about permanent identities across websites, as well as some "rooms" where you can enter to have a chat...
I'll need to think this through. I don;t want to overcomplicate the project...Part of charm is the simplicity.
An identity doesn't need to be more than a public gpg key. Anything else is just what they (or anyone, really) say about themselves relative to a given subject.
> People in a town square still have identities. They are just likely to not know each other.
I think that entirely depends on the size of the town. For a big city this is absolutely true, but in a small village you would expect to find at least a few familiar faces.
But then you have to deal with social media regulators and arbiters and be subject to untold liability
Fun! There’s a lot of features there to play with and it acts as a real time view counter.
Interestingly I used it then left without even reading the article
Much more features are coming! Someone pushed a PR for a futball, and I've added cats and custom hats.
Feels like the old web days tbh
Now this is cool! I'd love to see something like it on most web pages as a way to interact with like-minded people... but then I start thinking about all the ways it's going to be abused and get sad.
I'm the site author and creator of TownSquare. The only moment it got a bit abused it was during the first HN spike. But before and after that, everything was friendly.
Love this idea and your creation of it. Unfortunately do think the parent's concerns are valid - at this moment on your site at least one person has set their name to something offensive so it shows up perpetually (under the street light). Anonymity+connectivity persists in bringing out the worst of our impulses, I guess...
Do you think names are really necessary? Or could they take some other form than text, perhaps unicode chars chosen from a selection of abstract shapes? The wonderful https://www.tunera.xyz/fonts/teranoptia/ comes to mind.
teranoptia looks cool as hell, thanks for sharing!
I think there might be some merit to a basic filter, perhaps some sort of timeout for obvious slurs. I see a few right now.
This is already sort of implemented. But moderation is a very very difficult problem to be solved and there are different philosophies for it...