This weekend Townsquare made it to the Hacker News front page.

I had posted it on Friday, but it didn’t make much noise at first. Then I went to Rock in Rio Lisbon and mostly forgot about it for a while.

On the way back home, around 3am, I saw an email from Hacker News moderation. They had liked the idea and moved the post into the second-chance pool, which meant it would get another shot on the front page.

That’s when things got wild.

I was checking everything on the way home: visitor numbers, server health, messages. When I opened the Townsquare landing page, the square was packed. There were people everywhere.

Part of me was happy, and part of me was a little sad that I had missed the beginning of it. By then the post had already been popular for a couple of hours and there were lots of comments I hadn’t answered.

Still, I don’t regret it. I was with my girlfriend, and sometimes real life should win.

At some point I called my mom and told her I had made it to the Hacker News front page. It felt a bit silly to care that much, but I did. It was one of those small internet milestones I had imagined for years and never really expected to hit.

It didn’t take long for people to start testing the system. Some were curious in a good way. Some were just trying to break things. We got the usual chaos, including bots and a weird synchronized chant of every possible variation of one very stupid word.

I couldn’t react fast enough, and that part bothered me. The people who might actually have liked the idea were seeing Townsquare at one of its messiest moments.

But even with that, something good was happening.

More Townsquares got verified. More sites joined. The map is growing. People sent me coffees. I started reading the comments and messages and realized the project had landed with some people in exactly the way I had hoped.

I also started a series called Town Highlights, where I can share interesting sites I find through Townsquare and talk to their owners. Check out the first highlight with Low Sound.

This is the first project I’ve made that got this kind of attention, and it is probably the silliest one too.

It is simple. It is not productive. It is not complex. It is not driven by algorithms. It does not make you the product.

I think that is exactly why it connects.

Townsquare touches something very basic: human connection, warmth, and the pleasure of finding someone else in a strange little corner of the internet.

I don’t know if it will keep growing. I don’t know how long people will keep using it. But as long as there is even one person walking around my site, smiling while jumping with a silly stick character and having an interesting conversation with a stranger, I’ll keep building it.