A widget shows you the strangers reading the same page — no accounts, no history. The old web fans loved it; the veterans winced

The pitch: presence without the baggage

Town Square is a small, open-source widget that renders the other people currently on a webpage as stick figures you can see moving around, watch read, and message in real time. Its whole design is subtraction: "The goal wasn't to build another social network," the creator writes — no accounts, no profiles, no follower counts, no permanent history. Messages exist only while people are there to read them, then vanish. The ambition is nostalgic and specific: to bring back "the sense that there are actual people on the other side of the screen," with a future vision of linking squares into a webring you can walk across, "transport to the neighbour website."

The indie-web crowd vs. the people who ran communities

The thread splits cleanly. Plenty of delight — but the most valuable replies are from people who've operated spaces like this and know the failure mode. The bluntest, from a sysadmin who's been moderating things for years:

"Oh, my sweet summer child … Really cool idea that I'd be reluctant to enable for any of my sites because I assume that it would just be used for people to be awful. Maybe I'm just still traumatized by Playstation Home? … The group met up and then spent the next few minutes being accosted by one a-hole after another." — a sysadmin recalling PlayStation Home

The deeper objection challenges the premise itself — that ephemerality is what made the old web feel human:

"people having accounts/permanence was one of the defining 'old web' feelings people keep talking about. A few people that were always in comment threads, or people with their own blogs linking back to you." — a commenter questioning the no-accounts ethos

That's the sharp disagreement under the charm. Town Square is built on forgetting; the commenter argues the magic of the old web was remembering — the same handful of named regulars showing up over years.

The reference that resolves it

The most useful comparison in the thread points at a game that already solved "wordless presence of real strangers" and made it move people:

"have you played the Playstation video game Journey? … you encounter other sort of people looking players, it turns out that those are actually people … There is no communication other than moving your character … that subtle engagement is in my opinion quite valuable." — a commenter invoking *Journey*

Journey is the existence proof and the warning at once. It works because it's a closed, designed space with no text and no way to be cruel — which is exactly the moderation and scope that an open, embed-on-any-site widget can't guarantee. The idea is genuinely lovely; whether it stays lovely depends on the two problems the pitch skips, and the thread wouldn't let it.