A widget shows you the strangers reading the same page — no accounts, no history. The old web fans loved it; the veterans winced (cauenapier.com)
Town Square is a tiny widget that shows other live visitors as stick figures on your site, lets them chat in real time, and keeps nothing — no accounts, no profiles, no history. The goal: make the web feel like there are people on the other side of the screen again.
The indie-web crowd adored it. Veterans pushed back on the two things it waves away: moderation (one recalled PlayStation Home, accosted within minutes) and whether ephemerality is even what made the old web human — the permanence was.
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