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Turn your site into a place people can bump into each other
Related: Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48608570 - June 2026 (166 comments)
- AndrewKemendo 3mo agoFun! 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
- cauenapier 3mo agoMuch more features are coming! Someone pushed a PR for a futball, and I've added cats and custom hats.
- AndrewKemendo 3mo agoFeels like the old web days tbh
- ranger_danger 3mo agoNow 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.
- cauenapier 3mo agoI'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.
- evnp 3mo agoLove 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/ https://www.tunera.xyz/fonts/teranoptia/ comes to mind.
- nickradford 3mo agoteranoptia looks cool as hell, thanks for sharing!
- tossmysalad 3mo ago[dead]
- Zak 3mo agoI think there might be some merit to a basic filter, perhaps some sort of timeout for obvious slurs. I see a few right now.
- cauenapier 3mo agoThis is already sort of implemented. But moderation is a very very difficult problem to be solved and there are different philosophies for it...
- m4lvin 3mo agoHow about these? - rate limit overall messages, maybe even percentage wise: if some ip sent more than 70% of all messages in the last minute, mute it. - let other users mark/report spam and if three others agree something is spam, block all slightly similar messages for 24 hours? - forbid sending the exact same message more than N times per M seconds. - rate limit color change and jump much more.
- cauenapier 3mo agoYeah, some of those are good ideas. I'll implement them. Thanks for the contribution! (Instead of just say it won't work, heheheh)
- 0xkistu 3mo agoPreviously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48608570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48608570 Really love the idea!
- dang 3mo agoThanks! Macroexpanded: Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48608570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48608570 - June 2026 (166 comments)
- graypegg 3mo ago> 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.
- cauenapier 3mo agoI'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.
- graypegg 3mo agoWould 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?
- cauenapier 3mo agoA permanent persona for a user across visits. Could even be across website visits, if they all use townsquare.
- mgkimsal 3mo agogo 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?
- thomastjeffery 3mo agoFun! 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.
- FinnKuhn 3mo ago> 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.
- cauenapier 3mo agoThat 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.
- thomastjeffery 3mo agoAn 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.
- SoftTalker 3mo agoNot 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.
- cauenapier 3mo agoThe 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/ https://townsquare.cauenapier.com/ (fixed link). Check out the map.
- henryecw 3mo agoMaybe add some geolocation filter for higher number of users? For example, limit number of people to 10 based on closest location
- cauenapier 3mo agoOhhh...that's an interesting idea!!! I'll put that on the roadmap, thanks!!!
- playorizaya 3mo ago[flagged]
- jmstfv 3mo agoI can't open that link. seems like no DNS records associated with the site? > nslookup cauenapier.townsquare.com Server: 192.0.2.42 Address: 192.0.2.42#53 server can't find cauenapier.townsquare.com: NXDOMAIN
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- cauenapier 3mo ago
- xuhu 3mo agoI 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".
- Schiendelman 3mo agoI'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!
- bix6 3mo agoLink if I want to stay updated? Sounds cool
- Schiendelman 3mo agoSure! I'm not quite ready to testflight. I'll reply to your comment when I've got a page up. :)
- Schiendelman 3mo agoFaster than I thought! Here's a link: https://reverdure.yourstrategy.co https://reverdure.yourstrategy.co 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!
- pflenker 3mo agoReminds 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odigo_Messenger
- parpfish 3mo agoi 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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowWow_(chat_program)
- oceliker 3mo agoReminds 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/ff0000com/ 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.
- truemoose 3mo agoI 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.
- cauenapier 3mo agothanks for that message! I made this for the community and this type of response makes me super happy!
- peab 3mo agoThis is awesome
- cauenapier 3mo agothaaanks :)
- sam_hosseini 3mo agoThis is so much fun! Thanks for making this!
- cauenapier 3mo agoYou are welcome! My hope was that people had fun and had interesting conversation. The second part only happens after the HN spike...ehhehe
- danvoell 3mo agotook 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.
- cauenapier 3mo agoI'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.
- freak42 3mo agoThere are 6 (!) posts about this in the last 15 days, can we not let it rest a bit?
- cauenapier 3mo agoI 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!
- canadiantim 3mo agoBut then you have to deal with social media regulators and arbiters and be subject to untold liability
- ncr100 3mo agoQuestion 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.
- cauenapier 3mo agoNoo...I never played it and didn't know about it! I'll check it out.
- ncr100 3mo agoAt the time it was a beautiful experience. I speculate player population may be low or zero now. Maybe watching a playthrough from that era would be an alternate good experience too.
- linsomniac 3mo agoOh, 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. ;-)
- cauenapier 3mo agoI 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 :)
- acrophiliac 3mo agoPersonally, 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.
- RobotToaster 3mo agoWould be great as an overlay for a livestream.
- cauenapier 3mo agoI'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!
- sisve 3mo agoPure fun. Love it.
- cauenapier 3mo agoThaaanks! That's the idea! Fun and meet random people. The experience is quite different from HN spike....but usually is calmer and friendlier.
- drooby 3mo agoHmm idk, this looks a bit more like serendipity for vitriolic trolls
- cauenapier 3mo agoWell, 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 https://townsquare.cauenapier.com/map
- trollbridge 3mo agoThe 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).
- KellyCriterion 3mo agoIn 2001, there was this browser extention showing "walking people" on the webfrontend and you could connect to them
- madprops 3mo agoSome 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/ 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.
- rexbrahh 3mo agokinda similar to the bullet comments flying through screen on the chinese youtube Bilibili
- assimpleaspossi 3mo agoThe 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.
- jaxn 3mo agoFun 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).
- cauenapier 3mo agoOhhh, I would love to hear a similar story like that for a couple that met on TownSquare!!!
- Ozzie-D 3mo ago[flagged]
- ElijahLynn 3mo agoThis 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!
- nelsonfigueroa 3mo agoThis 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 https://townsquare.cauenapier.com/#square
- mountainriver 3mo agoI love the idea but all I’m seeing is people saying really explicative things. Hopefully there are better ways of moderating
- subu311 3mo agoThe comments on your site are just what i expected
- zahlman 3mo agoMust be nice to be able to take seriously the idea that multiple people might be browsing your site simultaneously… :(
- widowlark 3mo agocool idea, but the experience was not great. All I see are stick figures rapidly moving back and forth spouting racial slurs
- BobbyTables2 3mo agoSo make it a public C&C server???
- system2 3mo agoDamn, that demo needs some moderation right now. Some dudes went nuts.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- LateCheckOut 3mo agoFeels rather creepy to me …
- amelius 3mo agoCan we just have the old Reddit back, please?
- p0larboy 3mo agoI know this is a long shot but I’m gonna try asking anyway because it has been eating away at me. 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.
- NostraDavid 3mo agoWas it http://apestronauts.com http://apestronauts.com (which redirects to https://apestronauts.herokuapp.com/ https://apestronauts.herokuapp.com/)? http://apestronauts.com http://apestronauts.com exists since 2012, so that seems a decent potential. Found it by throwing your comment into ChatGPT.
- sahiltll 3mo agocool theory
- medbar 3mo agoCool idea. Wish my site drove real traffic instead of bots so I could add this and not confuse/bore visitors :’)
- sermah 3mo agocauenapier make left/right button controls for mobile. Also fullscreen in portrait orientation doesn’t really make sense until messages move up in the sky, so that they don’t need to fit in that narrow horizontal space
- drsh0 3mo agoLove this!!! Quick feedback: I keep thinking the Disable Townsquare button is a toggle for dark/light theme :/
- cauenapier 3mo agoYou and a lot of people. For some reason I've been postponing changing the icon to a ZZ or some sort of toggle... But I also want to I plement a day/night mode for the widget. So I've been postponing the first to do both together. Anyway, the widget does work with dark mode. But then you need to change the site to dark mode.
- drsh0 3mo agoJust thought I'd share a quick wholesome update. I felt transported to better times after playing around with this to when I used to spend my time on WinMX chatrooms, IRC, or much later playing a simple flash game called Transformice, or when reddit had RPAN! Strangers are the best!
- sunandsurf 3mo agoLove the idea!
- hoppp 3mo agoCool idea but needs rate limit and abuse protection. There is already a bot spamming hate speech
- npilk 3mo agoHaha, I guess having a troll posting nonstop racial slurs is just part of that old web feel...
- cauenapier 3mo agoI'm working on that!
- taintlord 3mo ago[dead]
- iluvcommunism 3mo ago[dead]
- SpyCoder77 3mo agoThere needs to be some filters on the messages
- ctdinjeu4 3mo ago[dead]
- kachurovskiy 3mo agoI've had a strange experience this week at a maker meetup in my city. Couple dozen people came to make a short presentation about what they're building and there was a somewhat lively networking with food and drinks. The project quality was all over the place but what struck me is that nobody really wanted to keep in touch after the meeting beyond adding each other on LinkedIn. I have even created a Telegram group and got several folks to join but they never replied or posted anything so today I had to just delete the group. Perhaps I didn't make the right impression or I've misunderstood the reasons people go to such meetups
- d4ng 3mo agoIf people ask me for LinkedIn (or Instagram in other contexts), I just get their number. It pierces the barrier of formality and makes it more personal. If the person is worth remembering (for friendship or work), connecting on LinkedIn isn’t going to be adding any value.
- grvdrm 3mo agoFew things annoy me more than the 5 minute convo followed by “let’s connect on LinkedIn” 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!
- Aurornis 3mo ago> but what struck me is that nobody really wanted to keep in touch after the meeting beyond adding each other on LinkedIn 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
- tossmysalad 3mo ago[dead]
- roer 3mo agoYour point stands, but this is not exactly an exemplary comment either
- AlexeyBelov 3mo agoHow does their point stand? It's just a typical troll shitting out something offensive and running away. They don't really have "a point".
- hackrmn 3mo agoIt's a great idea but I've lately adopted the habit of just looking at the code and noting SLOC count. I am bewildered how people today add code like there's no tomorrow, I suppose the advocates would quote "literate programming" and onboarding and what not, but I think reality is showing the code gets the better of us and we're absolutely squeezed by the volume of code that kind of works and kind of doesn't, exhibits issues (including vulnerabilities) and at the end of the day just rots looking at the next kid taking over. And I am not loving it anymore. 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.
- PeterStuer 3mo ago... and run head first into totalitarian 'chat control' regulation all around the globe.
- xtiansimon 3mo agoInteresting. 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?