Turn your site into a place people can bump into each other

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.

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 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.

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!

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.

Anproto would fit the bill for a simple "I was here, you may have seen me elsewhere" https://anproto.com/

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 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.

I'll need to think this through. I don;t want to overcomplicate the project...Part of charm is the simplicity.

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 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.

  > nslookup cauenapier.townsquare.com

  Server:  192.0.2.42
  Address: 192.0.2.42#53

  server can't find cauenapier.townsquare.com: NXDOMAIN

It's https://townsquare.cauenapier.com/

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.

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

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!

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!

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!

What's your monetisation plan and how can we be assured that the data collected won't be used for military purposes?

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.

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'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).

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.

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).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odigo_Messenger

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowWow_(chat_program)

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.

The second part only happens after the HN spike...ehhehe

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.

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 :)