It has been two days since I posted about the release of Town Square, and I thought it would be nice to write a quick report.

My post got automatically posted on Bubbles and I shared it on Hacker News. Someone also posted it on Lobste.rs, which I had never heard of before. Later it got posted on some other sites I don’t even know. All of that generated a big traffic spike. Lots of people visited the site and explored the town square at the bottom.

Things got crowded quickly, but it was fun. People started talking, walking around. Just figuring things out.

People understood it very quickly and soon started asking for features. The most requested feature was jumping. Birds came second. I added both in less then an hour or two, and it was fun to see how quickly people started playing with them. Someone said:

"it's fun to chase the birds"

While running around and making birds fly. A lot of people were just jumping around and enjoying it.

We also noticed quickly that the mobile experience is not great yet. So I already started working on that.

Sunday morning I had a wonderful surprise. Someone sent me 5 euros through the "Buy my a coffee" button on my site. It was such a good way to wake up! It is not really about the money. It is about the signal. It is about someone making that extra effort to say, in a very direct way, that this meant something to them. And that means a lot to me.

I can finally cross this item off my Impossible List¹:

Make 1 Euro from something I built online

I have been following the messages and having a blast reading the comments. I've received several emails from people just thanking me about it. Some of the comments in my site's Town Square were also very sweet. Things like:

• "This is charming."
• "This blog post is sick"
• "This animation is surprisingly satisfying"

Of course, there were also some people being disrespectful for a while. Some racist nonsense and that kind of thing. But I think the best response, in this case, is just to ignore it.

And humans being humans, people also spent an unexpected amount of time talking about farting.

Obviously, bots showed up too. Someone made a group of bots that ran around, talking and jumping. At one point they were all synchronized. It felt like the middle of a wedding party, with drunk people doing a train dance.

The idea behind Town Square was always about community. So getting this kind of response from people made me really happy.

More than the traffic or the feature requests, I loved seeing people having fun together. That was the best part. For example, one person said they were about to go into a job interview, and three other people just wished them good luck. If you are that person and are reading this, I hope it went well!

So far, 31 sites have registered on my hosted instance of Town Square, but just 11 of them are already verified. A big shout out to the sites that already connected and verified themselves. Thank you for joining in:

• newsonaut.com
• blog.narf.ssji.net
• ournarberth.com
• ashishb.net
• j17.org
• inhji.de
• pkcbarc.oss.zone
• overengineer.it.com
• triffid.org
• kristoff.it

I will soon be creating a map of all these sites and hopefully start connecting those town squares. I also want to make Town Square more open over time, so people can create their own props and build interesting things around the map and the wider world.