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 .
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
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.