> 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.
What about bot traffic? I was imagining how this might appear on my own blog. Prolly quite empty of stick figures. But what about the “hordes” of bots which apparently make up some 50% of Net traffic?
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 the demo page for others to see: https://townsquare.cauenapier.com/#square
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.
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!
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.
Really love the idea!
There is already a bot spamming hate speech
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".
Interestingly I used it then left without even reading the article
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.
I remember seeing a website with the same concept as what the OP has done but with gorillas. It was during the early HTML5 and web socket days and I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
I tried googling for it but nothing came up. Appreciate if anyone can give me a lead.
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. ;-)
Anproto would fit the bill for a simple "I was here, you may have seen me elsewhere" https://anproto.com/
You had your IRC, with no message persistence, no image hosting, and no persistent account names (being able to reserve a username was an optional add-on feature). People would show they were away by changing their username from bob to bob_afk.
And it was common for people to use a nickname (for safety) and never show their face (because posting photos was a big effort). A person could be called 'cmdrtaco' or 'hemos' and that was enough, didn't need their real name or photograph or anything.
But you're right that there were also more small forums using things like phpBB which would be dedicated to a single interest, and they were much more human-scale communities. And people could have big signatures and animated GIF avatars, so you couldn't help but remember them!
20K SLOC for a site widget? There's nothing great about that. But sure -- I guess it works. Everything can be ignored because "it works", but in my experience the gears are bound to start flying sooner or later and someone needs to look under the hood -- whether it's under the hood of Townsquare or something that has long replaced it. And it better be service-able.
While I’m sure some folks were doing it for that reason, there are a whole bunch of us who were just doing things like that because it was fun. We didn’t need to be popular (but that would have been nice too), we were just kids looking for a community where we fit in.
The Internet back then was a grab bag, a hodge podge, a diaspora, and a most importantly a place to be who you wanted to be instead of a place where your “real” identity followed you everywhere.
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.
Anyway, the widget does work with dark mode. But then you need to change the site to dark mode.
I'll need to think this through. I don;t want to overcomplicate the project...Part of charm is the simplicity.
This is why I gradually stopped attending local events and meetups. When I first graduated college and started going to events and meetups there was a sense that everyone wanted to be part of a community first, and the presentations were a chance for community members to take turns putting together something for the group.
Over time the meetups started attracting more people who just wanted something transactional out of the group: They would show up, present, then only stay long enough to try to gauge if they could get anything out of the audience: Recruit them as customers for their startup, get contacts for fundraising, find someone who might offer them a job, or some other goal they were seeking. They would stay long enough to collect LinkedIn contacts and then leave, many never returning again unless they had something else they wanted out of the group.
It only takes a few sessions where meetup attendees arrive expecting a community discussion but then realize they’re being pitched someone’s startup or being mined for business leads. Then they lose interest in attending future events. The meetups became a shell of the former community. I still attend events from time to time but it often feels like most people are just there for networking and move on from conversations as soon as they determine the other person isn’t in a position to get them a job
The experience is quite different from HN spike....but usually is calmer and friendlier.
http://apestronauts.com exists since 2012, so that seems a decent potential.
Found it by throwing your comment into ChatGPT.
I grew even more skeptical over the past year when a VC dude connected to me (during a conversation) and then later removed me. No harm done as we barely know each other. But it caused an even stronger distaste for that impulse.
What I still like instead? Take my card!
Then when there’s enough demand, you’re shown meeting spots and times to vote with RSVPs.
The key is the widget has to be embeddable and agnostic of the content so it can manage itself based on sensible rules (only show possible events when there’s enough demand, but make the demand really easy to measure).
Exactly. This is what made the Internet back then. Ironically, we have now done a reversal and the real world is the way to escape
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 second part only happens after the HN spike...ehhehe
Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48608570 - June 2026 (166 comments)
or explore other people's websites that are using Townsquare. Check them out here https://townsquare.cauenapier.com/map
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.
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.
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!
Maybe watching a playthrough from that era would be an alternate good experience too.
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).
Who wants that on their web site? In some jurisdictions you’re going to be in trouble for facilitating hate and calls for violence (or worse). This is why what you have implemented will not work in its current form. I suggest you move to a system that characters can trigger only standard phrases and emoticons.
> nslookup cauenapier.townsquare.com
Server: 192.0.2.42
Address: 192.0.2.42#53
server can't find cauenapier.townsquare.com: NXDOMAINMy 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.
What's your monetisation plan and how can we be assured that the data collected won't be used for military purposes?
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'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).
But I guarantee the most of the times, the TownSquare in my site is much calmar and friendlier. People having actually interesting conversations. What you saw was a reflection of the page going FrontPage on HN
Note that the walkthrough system is very new and finicky, and I'm rewriting AI slop copy by hand as I get farther through the story. I update on average more than once a day. Have a look, and feel free to email ben@yourstrategy.co if you have questions or feedback, I'd love it!
Since I do actual workout tracking, all health and fitness data and raw location data stays on device. The only thing I send back to my web service is what interactions you've made with the game world, what you've captured and built. I have no plan to have you take photos of anything, either. I won't have any monetizable data, really.
My plan to monetize is an optional subscription that gives you more capabilities, like having more allies together, being able to build more than one thing at a time, and being able to hold more energy from a workout before your meter caps. If it gets successful I'll definitely do paid cosmetics. I also think there's an avenue for me to get grants from local health departments if I can prove I increase people's fitness through the game, but that would be opt in and way down the line.
I'm a big fan of not growing your company speculatively, and instead proving out your revenue and growing organically.
What else would you suggest? If this ever got big enough for its own corporate entity I think I would bake a lot of protections into the corporate structure, and definitely be a B corporation.
Note that the walkthrough system is very new and finicky, and I'm rewriting AI slop copy by hand as I get farther through the story. I update on average more than once a day. Have a look, and feel free to email ben@yourstrategy.co if you have questions or feedback, I'd love it!
Note that the walkthrough system is very new and finicky, and I'm rewriting AI slop copy by hand as I get farther through the story. I update on average more than once a day. Have a look, and feel free to email ben@yourstrategy.co if you have questions or feedback, I'd love it!
A few weeks ago, I added a silly, funny experiment on this website. I talked about it on this blog post. It was a tiny Town Square at the bottom of every page 2.
When you visit the site, you'll see a small strip populated by stick figures. Each figure represents another visitor currently browsing the website. You can see what page people are reading, walk around and send messages. For example, you could see someone reading the same article as you and start a discussion about it.
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.
After several people asked me how they could add this to their own websites, I decided to open source it and provide a public server, so anyone can easily integrate Town Square into their site with no self-hosting required. I hope it encourages a few more websites to feel like places instead of pages.
If you would like to host it yourself, fork it or contribute with the project, the repo is https://github.com/cauenapier/TownSquare/
If you don't want to (or don't know how to) host it yourself, you can register your website on Town Square.
I have a lot of ideas for what I could to next. It has been a fun, relaxing, small project so far.
Like adding more props for the characters to interact and improving overal user experience on the chat feature. But I'm also very excited about the idea of implementing the functionality to connect your TownSquare with another website, like a neighbour. You would walk to the edge of the site and transport to the neighbour website, creating a network of townsquares. Like a Webring 1
If you like the idea and have requests, changes, or ideas for what Town Square could become, send me an email. I'd genuinely love to hear from you.
Or the Indie Webring, as I have in the bottom of my page. ↩
Check it at the bottom of this page. ↩