TownSquare started from a feeling I missed on the internet.

The web is full of content now, but it often feels empty in a human sense. You can read a great post, spend time on a beautiful personal site and still have no feeling that anyone else is there with you. I missed the older web feeling of bumping into people in forums, chats and strange little corners of the internet.

So I built a tiny town square at the bottom of my site.

The idea was simple: not a social network, not a community platform, just a lightweight presence layer. You show up as a little character. You can see other people wandering around. If someone is reading the same page, you notice. If they are elsewhere on the site, you can still see that the place is alive. You can walk, jump, send a short message and then move on.

What mattered to me was that it stayed small and forgetful. No accounts. No profiles. No permanent chat history. Just enough presence to make a website feel inhabited.

At first, TownSquare was only an experiment on my own site. But people immediately understood it. They started playing with it, asking for features and emailing me to say how charming it felt. That reaction changed the project. I realized this should not just live on my website, so I open sourced it and started hosting a public version that other sites could join.

That was when the project became more than an experiment.

In the first days after release, people were not only testing it. They were actually enjoying it. They asked for silly things like jumping and birds and I added them quickly. They pointed out that mobile needed work, which it did. More importantly, they started having real interactions inside it. My favorite early example was seeing people wish a stranger good luck before a job interview. That was exactly the kind of small human moment I had hoped for.

Then the project started spreading. New sites joined. I built a landing page, customization options and a live map showing verified TownSquares and the roads between them. The map made the whole thing click for me. Instead of isolated widgets, it started to feel like a small world made of neighboring websites.

The biggest surge came when TownSquare reached the Hacker News front page. That was exciting, chaotic and a little stressful. The square filled with people, bots showed up, moderation problems became more obvious and I could feel the limits of a rough project getting real attention. But even through the mess, the core idea held up. People still got it. They still liked it. They still wanted more places on the web to feel like places.

That is probably why TownSquare matters to me more than some of the technically harder things I have built. It is simple, a little silly and not obviously useful in the usual productivity sense. But it touches something real: the feeling that the internet can still be warm, playful and shared.

Where it stands

TownSquare is live, growing and is the project I feel most pulled to keep evolving. It already works as an embeddable widget, has a hosted version other sites can join and is slowly turning into a network instead of a single experiment. As of today, July 3rd, there are 110 verified sites. I still want to improve mobile, moderation, customization and the connections between sites, but the main idea already feels proven to me. Even a tiny bit of presence can change how a website feels.