alt.hn

6/27/2026 at 5:11:20 PM

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

 https://cauenapier.com/blog/townsquare_release/

by eustoria

6/27/2026 at 7:22:32 PM

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".

by xuhu

6/27/2026 at 7:55:20 PM

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!

by Schiendelman

6/27/2026 at 8:02:32 PM

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

by allthetime

6/27/2026 at 8:09:50 PM

Yeah, the internet was originally an extension of the real world, and it probably should have stayed that way.

by unfitted2545

6/27/2026 at 8:45:46 PM

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.

by ncr100

6/27/2026 at 8:47:39 PM

Noo...I never played it and didn't know about it! I'll check it out.

by cauenapier

6/27/2026 at 6:41:06 PM 

    > 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.

by graypegg

6/27/2026 at 6:43:51 PM

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.

by cauenapier

6/27/2026 at 7:30:39 PM

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?

by graypegg

6/27/2026 at 7:57:11 PM

A permanent persona for a user across visits. Could even be across website visits, if they all use townsquare.

by cauenapier

6/27/2026 at 7:16:25 PM

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.

by SoftTalker

6/27/2026 at 7:21:09 PM

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.

by cauenapier

6/27/2026 at 8:23:40 PM

Maybe add some geolocation filter for higher number of users? For example, limit number of people to 10 based on closest location

by henryecw

6/27/2026 at 8:25:17 PM

Ohhh...that's an interesting idea!!! I'll put that on the roadmap, thanks!!!

by cauenapier

6/27/2026 at 8:28:29 PM

I 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

by jmstfv

6/27/2026 at 8:43:15 PM

There are 6 (!) posts about this in the last 15 days, can we not let it rest a bit?

by freak42

6/27/2026 at 8:50:43 PM

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!

by cauenapier

6/27/2026 at 7:29:08 PM

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.

by truemoose

6/27/2026 at 7:58:31 PM

thanks for that message! I made this for the community and this type of response makes me super happy!

by cauenapier

6/27/2026 at 7:26:52 PM

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.

by oceliker

6/27/2026 at 7:23:12 PM

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

by pflenker

6/27/2026 at 8:49:43 PM

But then you have to deal with social media regulators and arbiters and be subject to untold liability

by canadiantim

6/27/2026 at 7:53:49 PM

This is so much fun! Thanks for making this!

by sam_hosseini

6/27/2026 at 7:57:43 PM

You are welcome! My hope was that people had fun and had interesting conversation.

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

by cauenapier

6/27/2026 at 8:14:12 PM

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.

by danvoell

6/27/2026 at 8:21:39 PM

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.

by cauenapier

6/27/2026 at 7:37:50 PM

This is awesome

by peab

6/27/2026 at 8:11:42 PM

thaaanks :)

by cauenapier

6/27/2026 at 6:58:32 PM

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.

by thomastjeffery

6/27/2026 at 8:28:00 PM

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.

by cauenapier

6/27/2026 at 8:56:23 PM

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.

by thomastjeffery

6/27/2026 at 7:13:20 PM

> 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.

by FinnKuhn

6/27/2026 at 6:33:36 PM

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

by AndrewKemendo

6/27/2026 at 8:22:37 PM

Much more features are coming! Someone pushed a PR for a futball, and I've added cats and custom hats.

by cauenapier

6/27/2026 at 6:37:10 PM

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.

by ranger_danger

6/27/2026 at 6:41:45 PM

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.

by cauenapier

6/27/2026 at 7:27:18 PM

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.

by evnp

6/27/2026 at 7:42:17 PM

teranoptia looks cool as hell, thanks for sharing!

by nickradford

6/27/2026 at 7:32:07 PM

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.

by Zak

6/27/2026 at 8:01:32 PM

This is already sort of implemented. But moderation is a very very difficult problem to be solved and there are different philosophies for it...

by cauenapier