Town Square is a Beautiful Experiment

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Town Square is a Beautiful Experiment

Blake Householder<br>Jul 06, 2026

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Is anyone here?

Even as everyone gets online, the web feels kind of... lonely. Here you sit, on Substack, reading this post. Maybe a few hundred other people will read it today. Is anyone else reading it right now? Or are you the last human alive, reading in solitude? Isn’t it kind of weird how the internet is full of millions of people, often doing the same thing, but usually doing it alone?<br>That’s why I love seeing projects like Town Square by Cauê Napier.<br>Town Square is an incredibly simple, super cute, interactive space that can hang out at the bottom of any web page and instantly adds a “someone is here” feeling. Users are represented as stick figures that move around at the bottom of the page. It’s open source, so anyone can grab the code and add it to their own site. It looks like this:

What I love most about this is what Cauê is trying to achieve. He wants people to have serendipitous social connections on web pages. He wants web pages to feel like someone else is here. As Matt Webb says, every webpage deserves to be a place. We need more of that!<br>So what can we learn from Cauê’s clever design decisions on Town Square?<br>Sometimes, Building Less is Harder

The conceptual gap between a social product like say, Facebook/Twitter, and Town Square is so incredibly vast, it’s hard to overstate it. To get Town Square, we have to eliminate:<br>Signups - There goes our user tracking!

Email verification - Spam and bots are welcome!

Profile/interest setup - Who are we even advertising to?

Declaring your social graph - So every message just goes to... everyone? How will we moderate?

And yet! When using a Town Square-enabled site, there’s this immediate, visceral sense of “someone is here” as soon as you see the stick figures move.<br>Just by visiting the site, you are already interacting with other people. As soon as the page loads, you’ll show up as a stick figure to everyone else. Other than having your computer visit the page for you, this is a literally zero-click interaction. Hard to beat!<br>The lesson I take from this is: “How can we eliminate user friction by brutally stripping away ‘features’ that are really ‘just what everyone else is doing’?” Do we need to confirm your email address before you’re allowed to say “hi”? I think not!<br>There’s a bit of a trade-off to this low-friction interaction, though.<br>Identity and Persistence

On Town Square, you’re a stick figure. If you want, you’re a stick figure with a color, and a little nametag. Your identity is pretty slim. (Cauê could always add more features to this, though)<br>Chat history is pretty minimal (as of this writing, you can hover to see your own last few messages?) so everything is maximally ephemeral, no real need to filter yourself or worry about your old Tweets coming back to bite you.<br>That’s great for the goal of this project: friendly, ephemeral interactions. However, if I were building this feature for myself, there’s an additional item on my wishlist: forming connections. What makes Town Square fun and lightweight also makes it challenging for people to form connections through Town Square. (Not that this is “missing” from his design, it just wasn’t a goal in the first place.)<br>Let’s Connect

Which brings me to my own project, Together.lol. I have a lot of the same goals as Town Square, but my biggest goal is that I want to help people make new friends online . Not “connections,” not likes on pithy quick-takes, but actual friends. Step 1 is creating a place that feels inhabited and alive. So how do we connect people ?<br>People People

Ok, you’re hanging out, but who are you talking to?<br>Town Square defaults to absolute simplicity: you drop in as an anonymous stick figure. It’s an incredibly elegant, zero-friction way to say, “Hey, I’m here right now.” If identity persists, it stays local to that specific site, keeping the entire experience lightweight and completely respectful of user privacy without relying on third-party tracking tracking mechanisms.<br>Together has one identity (or you can always create throwaways in Incognito) so you can form ongoing connections. Together uses a centralized architecture to be site-independent. To keep things low-friction while still offering a recognizable identity, users are automatically assigned AdjectiveAdjectiveAnimalNumber handles. If you’ve ever wanted to be recognized across the web as TiredObnoxiousZebra7, I have excellent news for you. (Don’t worry, you can change it.)<br>Ok, so we’re all chatting with each other, but on what website?

Connecting to Content

Town Square partners with site owners. It provides a simple script that owners embed directly into their own pages and gives them total control over what happens.<br>Together allows users to link to a URL, cache a version of it, and serve it back to users. This lets a user bring their own social experience...