Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites

ccauenapier about 14 hours ago 20 commentsRead Article on townsquare.cauenapier.com

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https://cauenapier.com/blog/townsquare_release/

https://cauenapier.com/blog/townsquare/

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

93% Positive

Analyzed from 392 words in the discussion.

Discussion (20 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

lambdaone•about 1 hour ago

I just took a look at the page's own 'town square'. At the moment, it's largely full of people saying offensive things for the sake of it.

trollbridge•3 minutes ago

Within about 300ms I thought “moderation is going to be a problem”.

dools•36 minutes ago

So it’s a twitter plugin?

patcon•35 minutes ago

I've been playing with presence too...! I def am thinking about using it more for real-time motion communication (which is largely missing from web) rather than text (which is very overrepresented, and where most moderation comes in).

I was toying with the idea of making a little crowd representation sticky at the bottom, like watching a screen together :)

Regardless, I love concepts like this. Thanks!

monkeymeister•about 2 hours ago

Neat idea! It's simple but very effective - and I really enjoy the detail of the benches and the tree. Very nice.

I wouldn't add it to any of my sites due to the unmoderated nature of it - seeing some fairly unsavory things in your demo - but that's just a little tweak, I'm sure!

wahnfrieden•about 1 hour ago

openai has a free moderation endpoint. no reason to not use it.

edit: downvoters either know something I don't about its unsuitability, or have outdated info on it and think it's against terms to use it for reasons unrelated to GPT. it's not against terms.

sourcegrift•about 2 hours ago

If your website attracts such elements perhaps there's a reason?

DougN7•10 minutes ago

The demo is attracting the HN crowd and it’s getting… well, let’s just say this crowd is about as good as it gets online.

oraziorillo•about 1 hour ago

I love the idea! The next step is to add role play games in town squares.

amatecha•26 minutes ago

Oh what the heck? That's super cool! Awesome idea. Possible future enhancement: some basic day/night (or even weather?) design elements that match the timezone of the person whose site it is? Still, doesn't even need it, it's really cool as-is!

I could see it being used as some avenue for saying toxic stuff, so I'm suddenly feeling like the only allowed actions should be ones that can never be harmful (like text interactions are just choosing from a pre-set list)..

loloquwowndueo•about 2 hours ago

> NOTE: This project has been mostly vibe-coded

I deeply appreciate the honesty here. I’ll pass based on the vibecodedness of it but perhaps it won’t be a dealbreaker for others.

lolptdr•about 1 hour ago

Is it the philosophical reason you refuse to engage or is it because you don’t trust the security of this project?

brody_hamer•about 1 hour ago

Easy come, easy go. I find most vibe coded projects are abandonware.

Also, in this context, security.

vitorbaptistaa•about 2 hours ago

This is amazing! Congratulations on the launch. Repository link somewhere?

SpyCoder77•about 1 hour ago

In the footer. https://github.com/cauenapier/TownSquare

lellow•about 1 hour ago

haha nice project! I stayed there for a couple of minutes and had such a good time!

mkl•about 1 hour ago

Not really a square if it's 1D - everyone ends up on top of each other.

cyanydeez•about 2 hours ago

would make more sense with webrtc.

sourcegrift•about 2 hours ago

First saw this on lobste.rs . Great idea, perhaps allow for a little customisation? I'd like minimal animation, just a counter of present people and a green dot that vibrates when someone is typing. Clicking either opens a chat box with last 20 minutes.

melvinczyk•about 2 hours ago

I like the idea of this like a town square for websites. Nice job