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
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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!
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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".
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!
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.
It's https://townsquare.cauenapier.com/
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.
Really love the idea!
Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48608570 - June 2026 (166 comments)
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.
The experience is quite different from HN spike....but usually is calmer and friendlier.
or explore other people's websites that are using Townsquare. Check them out here https://townsquare.cauenapier.com/map
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).
The second part only happens after the HN spike...ehhehe
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odigo_Messenger
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. ;-)
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 :)
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.
I'll need to think this through. I don;t want to overcomplicate the project...Part of charm is the simplicity.
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.
Interestingly I used it then left without even reading the article
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.