Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites

https://townsquare.cauenapier.com/

by cauenapier • 1 month ago

278 160 1 month ago

townsquare.cauenapier.com

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

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

vitorbaptistaa2• 1 month ago

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

SpyCoder77• 1 month ago

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

sourcegrift3• 1 month 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.

loloquwowndueo• 1 month 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• 1 month 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• 1 month ago

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

Also, in this context, security.

purple-leafy5• 1 month ago

Yeah. I also don’t like the fact the dev posts the link and doesn’t interact with anyone here at all, so the link posting is effectively spray and pray abandonware too. Easy come easy go like they say

fragmede2• 1 month ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=cauenapier shows a bunch of comments from the dev.

cauenapier27• 30 days ago

Sorry! I wasn't present because the post went to the FrontPage while I was at Rock in Rio. Two days of shows, going to sleep at 5 am. The original post didn't get to the FrontPage, but just later it got bumped.

melvinczyk• 1 month ago

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

monkeymeister• 1 month 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!

sourcegrift3• 1 month ago

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

DougN7• 1 month 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.

wahnfrieden• 1 month 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.

ranger_danger2• 24 days ago

no reason to not use it

Except that sending all your private communications to a big scary corporation is generally frowned upon.

cauenapier27• 1 month ago

Actually, there is moderation. The problem is that the page came to HN before I added the moderation keywords or implemented more things :P But overall, it's possible.

On the details like benches and trees, you can also customize it. YOu can add as many props as you want, wherever you want, and style them accordingly. :)

tamimio• 1 month ago

Love the idea, I added to my site!

I know it might be too much to ask for, but it would be great to have the ability to add your own props, like an icon and how to animate it. I would love to add maybe cats or drones icons that also move around!

cyanydeez• 1 month ago

would make more sense with webrtc.

lellow• 1 month ago

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

cauenapier27• 30 days ago

I'm glad to hear it! It makes me happy to see that other people are also having a good time in there. That was the goal!

mkl• 1 month ago

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

Wolfbeta• 1 month ago

Not really a highway if it's a series of tubes.

cauenapier27• 30 days ago

It has length and height, so it's 2D... Heheh

But I get your point.

lambdaone• 1 month 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.

dools• 1 month ago

So it’s a twitter plugin?

trollbridge• 1 month ago

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

wwind123• 1 month ago

Yeah, I had exactly the same thought.

childintime3• 1 month ago

Why? Messages disappear after a few seconds. So all messages are self moderating!

jumbo1111• 1 month ago

AI can moderate given specific instructions to prevent anything that can damaged the brand's image.

Mtinie3• 1 month ago

After having been a moderator for a number of communities over the years—BBCs in the 90s, niche forums during the 00s & 10s, Reddit boards in the 20s—I’ve come to believe that running shadow services where disruptive individuals can comingle may be the best way to handle this.

The advent of LLMs really opens the door to shunting off these “community members “ who’d rather contribute in misanthropic ways for the lulz than either leave or not contribute at all. They can take part in an interactive echo chamber that gives just as well as they can. You don’t even need a powerful model so the overall costs to the community are probably lower than the alternatives of trying to coexist with community-arsonists.

I spent years trying to find ways to bring people productively “into the fold” but eventually realized that it is futile in some cases because there’s zero value to the individual or the community to find a middle ground. They want to see things burn, and the community simply wants them out.

fragmede2• 1 month ago

But why not kick them out? Why bother with a shadow site for them?

purple-leafy5• 1 month ago

Yes this is the way, give no affordance that they are banned

paytonjjones3• 1 month ago

This suggestion is scarier than the thought someone might say a slur.

You're talking about using a machine to detect social undesirables then quarantining them in the matrix.

lifeformed• 1 month ago

Maybe a really lightweight fast LLM could moderate messages in realtime. Not sure how pricey that would get though.

michaelmrose• 1 month ago

Extremely if not behind substantially cheaper anti spam measures.

Further it may still make sense to use human reports to gate some automation even if it slows response.

Jolter• 1 month ago

No matter how cheap per request, someone will figure out a way to DoS that endpoint, and it will be extremely pricy unless you have effective rate limiting.

oraziorillo• 1 month ago

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

Procrastes2• 1 month ago

I was thinking the same thing, or even just little minigames and Easter eggs for people to find.

cauenapier27• 30 days ago

That's definitely coming!

patcon• 1 month 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!

amatecha• 1 month 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)..

vitorbaptistaa2• 1 month ago

Nintendo does this on Mario Kart, just allowing text from a pre-set list. It's very limited, but works.

cauenapier27• 1 month ago

Thaaanks! I've thought about weather , but I loved the idea for day/night! I'll definately implement that soon!

It already has block/ban and block word list, but unfortunatelly I haven't added them in the settings for the landing page before HN made it front page.. Opsy

mirkofr• 1 month ago

Maybe adding rooms will be a good move

zhxiaoliang• 1 month ago

I enjoyed the design.

cauenapier27• 1 month ago

Thaaanks :D

hallman76• 1 month ago

I've always wondered if we could find a way to add content website's content without it turning into a shitshow. MLS listings / Zillow is an interesting use-case. A realtor might describe something as "sun-filled" but omit that the home is next to a 24/7 dump truck repair warehouse.

afpx• 1 month ago

There was a thing from the 90s kind of like this called Third Voice. It was a cool idea, but I remember there being a lot of backlash from brands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Voice

ArcaneMoose• 1 month ago

Really cool but should limit # of people shown when there are too many. Currently it gets really laggy

cauenapier27• 30 days ago

There is actually a limit, but I think it was too high. Currently the limit is for the deployment, but your comment gave me the idea that I should give this option to the site owner.

winddude• 1 month ago

interesting. i'm appearing as a grey guy not the orange guy like your blog says

cauenapier27• 1 month ago

You can change your color by clicking in the pencil icon.

simondanerd• 1 month ago

Love the idea. Could use some filters and stale (sleeping) clients could get removed quicker.

Also, it seemed to be disconnecting quite often, maybe a hug of death thing.

cauenapier27• 1 month ago

Yeah, I'll definatelly improve that! I wasn't expecting HN crowd :sweat

freakynit2• 1 month ago

I made something similar last year: A p2p chat popup (that sits on bottom right of the page as a bubble) that allows all visitors to chat with each other. It had simple keyword based moderation in-built (can be easily bypassed though).

Was planning to add github oauth to get a known identity and persistent messaging so visitors can chat with each other across sites.

Instead of a webmaster adding script to their site, it was a browser extension.

The intent was two folds:

1. Get to know other people having similar interests,

2. Try something on the lines of a decentralized chat/messaging system.

goobatrooba• 1 month ago

It sounds like a nice idea, but probably only one of those things that work only once at scale - with hundreds of millions of pages, you will only meet others on the most common ones unless the extension is already very popular?

freakynit2• 1 month ago

That's true.

Site-local chat was meant to be the default way. But, was not restricted to that. People could keep whitelisted list of sites that they are open to get pings/DM's from.

I was still not able to figure out the privacy-focused, and local, interest matching part since it was meant to be p2p (without any server storage), and local storage can easily be tweaked.

If this was solved, my plan then was to automatically suggest people who may have similar interests depending on the sites they browse, for how long, and the messages they generally send.

Kinda like tinder, but, you don't have to sign-up and install no app.

cr125rider• 1 month ago

The network effect is HARD

Procrastes2• 1 month ago

This is great! Thank you for sharing it. Fun to use and already customizable.

cauenapier27• 1 month ago

Thanks! And more customizations are coming!

ameon• 1 month ago

this is a very clever concept. I'll keep it in mind for the future - when my app site has persistent amount of visitors. Are there some rules/settings for stop words to prevent some types of abuse? Or is it planned?

cauenapier27• 1 month ago

Thanks!! :D Yes there is already rules/settings to stop words and ban people. I'm also improving overall moderation and banning mechanisms.

purple-leafy5• 1 month ago

Moderation moderation moderation . It’s a big problem

I have similar moderation concerns in my browser game/engine but I only ban offensive slurs not swears, but I give no visual affordance that the word is not allowed

The only surface where players see the input content is in a share card, and if they finish a game and get to the share card they will find the offensive word has been REDACTED lol

So it’s a long feedback loop just to find out your hijinks lead nowhere

sneak2• 1 month ago

…or you could just let people talk? People who engage with social features generally do so because they want to talk to other people. That carries some inherent risks.

ncallaway• 1 month ago

Nah, drive those horrible people out of social spaces. I want to talk to other people without racist assholes bumbling around.

Being a racist asshole carries some inherent risks too, like people choosing not to let you enter their spaces.

purple-leafy5• 1 month ago

No? Especially not in my case where it’s a share artefact that is intended to be shared with others on various platforms.

Having my game aesthetic + slur on a sharing artefact is a great way for people to think my game encourages that crap and to “cancel” the game.

Not that I agree with, or care about, cancel culture - but I don’t want people in general associating my game with slurs.

I’m all for swearing and saying funny things that are not pc, but I draw the line at harmful offensive content.

Do what you wish but do no harm unto others.

starkparker• 1 month ago

The demo widget right now is botted with people spamming nonsense to the point of breaking browsers, much less the intended use. "let people talk" is not the same as "give disruptive people the tools to prevent others from talking"

febusravenga• 1 month ago

when I entered site, all bubbles contained dicks/balls and combination of these... so... someone found words that are not banned, but still abused forum in most primitive way ..

you're wrong, moderation is needed in ventures like this

herval• 1 month ago

Yea I think this was somewhat true back in 2001. With bots composing half the traffic of the internet, governments controlling massive social botnets and the polarization of politics everywhere, the internet became a full scale spam/hate fest

subscribed• 1 month ago

I don't think horrible people (eg racist, xenophobic, bigots) have the right to share space with good, kind people.

They have the privilege they forfeit the moment they try to hurt others. If they don't behave like cunts I don't care, but if they do, I'll use any tool I have at my disposal to bar them from the space they don't respect. They can talk to their kind in the nasty spaces anyway, so it's not like they're in the solitary confinement.

tasuki• 1 month ago

What is the difference between slurs and swears?

flexagoon• 1 month ago

Slurs are targeted towards specific groups of people (or I guess just anyone? "Clanker" is considered a slur, and you can probably come up with plenty of slurs for animals, they just won't be considered offensive and socially unacceptable like the ones for humans)

zdc1• 1 month ago

This was actually a lot of fun. Not as much trolling as I anticipated. Surprising amount of normal chit chat.

cauenapier27• 1 month ago

When you go to a nice website and encounter people with similar interests reading the same thing, the experience is awesome!

figbert• 1 month ago

Matt Webb made a version of this (and wrote about it) a while back—Cursor Party: https://interconnected.org/home/2024/09/05/cursor-party

I contemplated implementing it on my site for a while but decided I didn’t want to add the JavaScript. Still find it a really cute concept.

aetherspawn• 1 month ago

Make a MapleStory-like one where each website can design their own room, and you can kill mobs and bosses and stuff. It would be neat if the characters and items persisted between.

Edit: a super smash brothers-like would be fun too. Maybe the page itself could be the platforms.

tonyrice• 1 month ago

rather interesting, except the spamming of the inappropriate messages.

cauenapier27• 30 days ago

The spamming and trolling was just an issue during the HN traffic spike. Now things are much calmer and more interesting. Additionally, I'm also adding more moderation and counter-bot mechanism.

dawie• 1 month ago

I love the idea, but it’s a real shame how people are using it. I wonder if AI can moderate it for offensiveness and spam prevention

cauenapier27• 1 month ago

Well, this is the behaviour of the crowd. Before HN, or even if you go to other websites that are using TownSquare, it can be quite fun.

A hade a lot of very funny and meaningful interaction with people visiting the sites

thatguysaguy• 1 month ago

The contrast between the example screenshots and the standard internet behavior in the live demo is hilarious

NitpickLawyer• 1 month ago

To paraphrase, there's no scheme for moderation / censoring / filtering that survives contact with the Internet. It simply can't be done. People take it as a challenge, and you can't design a system that handles it while remaining useful.

If you ban words, people will introduce typos / different spelling. If you ban concepts people will change the concepts (see the "unalive" thing that's popular now). If people want to be miserable, they will be miserable. And they'll invent new words, or use euphemisms to get their point across.

blooalien• 1 month ago

Neat idea, but there seems to be zero defense against spammer scum. One jerk with a bot script seems able to make it totally useless for everyone else there.

cauenapier27• 1 month ago

Actually, there was. But I haven't added all of them to the landing page. I wasn't expecing making HN front page :sweat (opooops) But there is already some basic moderation and ban/kick functionalities.

However, there is still lots of room for improvement.

thih9• 1 month ago

A problem repeatedly occurred on https://cauenapier.com/

People are flooding the channel with messages, causing the widget to use too many resources on ios; and the website is being endlessly reloaded.

Any idea how to fix this? Bonus points for user friendly non technical solutions, ie is there a way to design an online social space where people want to collaborate and their first thought isn’t trolling?

purple-leafy5• 1 month ago

I’m not on pc so can’t inspect it, but make it a sandboxes iframe so it can’t interact with the parent site.

Is there a way to throttle iframe cpu usage ?

You could probably queue messages, cull old messages, cap concurrent connections. That may be the issue is too many peers

cauenapier27• 30 days ago

Nobody trolled it before the HN FrontPage.

Whatever it is, if something hit the crowd, you will end up with people trolling. No matter how much moderation you add.

You can check it now and things are much calmer and friendlier. The same if you go to other people's websites using TownSquare.

Regaring the mobile resources usage, I'll need to fix it. I'll be working on it next.

ljcoco• 1 month ago

cool idea!

jedberg• 1 month ago

In the "this is why we can't have nice things" category, the first thing I saw was someone calling themselves "dick and balls". :(

cauenapier27• 1 month ago

Yeah, but don't lat the HN crowd spoil the thing. You can check the other sites that are using Hackernews and you might have a great experience! I've been chatting with a lot of people with similar interest and had a lot of very nice interactions!

iJohnDoe• 1 month ago

This is actually really cool. We’ve needed this concept everywhere in technology. Something like this would have prevented the isolation and loneliness technology and the internet has created.

I don’t know all the answers, but joining people together, and reminders there are real people still there as we’ve moved from the physical world to the virtual world is an important part of the progression. In 50-100 years we will either have this epiphany or we will fail miserably.

swiftcoder• 1 month ago

Love it, also love that there's one HN visitor just hanging out typing "dick and balls" over and over again. That's unmoderated anonymous public squares for you

childintime3• 1 month ago

That was dang if I'm not mistaken.

joegyoung• 1 month ago

That person is still spamming the service even after 21 hours

pistoriusp• 1 month ago

Built something like this for the v1.0 launch of RedwoodSDK in March; but it's a popularity graph (like the time scrubber on YouTube). I figured that it could be useful to myself, and others, to aggregate the information that people find most useful.

https://rwsdk.com

msafi04• 1 month ago

I like the idea! congrats!

cauenapier27• 1 month ago

Thaaanks :)

VaradD09• 1 month ago

Looks good!

anirbanhere2• 1 month ago

This is so cool, gonna add this to my game website. This can easily help to get me multiplayer matching in the game.

cauenapier27• 1 month ago

Cool! Let me know when you add it! I'll like to make a blog post about it :)

anirbanhere2• 26 days ago

I added it in my game website: Ghostfleet.in, check it out. There is a need for moderation in the player names too, chat moderation may not be sufficient and names can be swear words too!!

StahlGuo• 1 month ago

what a cute project

aweiher• 1 month ago

I love the atmosphere with the benches and the tree

cauenapier27• 30 days ago

Good! The idea was to give a lovely calm atmosphere. I also allow site owners to customize the scene as they want.

Jeff9James• 1 month ago

yay i just added it to my site signupdoggy.pages.dev thanks so much

justeoghan• 1 month ago

Oh how fun. Sadly I went there and someone has botted it with “dick and balls” constantly being spammed by multiple people. But that’s to be expected when something gets attention. On other sites I can see this being nice addition. And a great concept.

cauenapier27• 1 month ago

Most of it were bots programmed to be saying silly things. I have already implemented some better counter-actions to that. This are much calmer now that the HN post is not on front page anymore. it is pretty fun when you meet someone on a site and had an interesting conversation

furyofantares3• 1 month ago

I'm interested in trying a moderation scheme that puts the power in the receiving client, with opinionated defaults. Let the client filter for itself, mute users for itself, and make users invisible to itself. Have default settings that make sense for the app, but let the user override them.

Use a cheap purpose-built LLM like OpenAI's free moderation endpoint to classify the text and send the original text plus the classification to clients, and let clients choose what to do with it, with opinionated defaults appropriate to the app.

Maybe you still need to identify persistent bad actors rather than acting only on content. But still, allow clients to decide what to do with that information.

I suppose my thinking is that strong default automatic moderation that's invisible to offenders is a requirement for a project like this to be able to offer a welcoming experience to users, but putting the power in an LLM and fixed filter lists feels very wrong. So my thought is to use those things to give the client power. But maybe that makes no difference if nobody changes settings away from defaults anyway.

toofy4• 1 month ago

on the other hand, if someone is making their own site, they may care about the user impression their site gives to visitors.

i would think they should have the freedom on the site they build and host to choose the impression they give. and sure, if they choose to let their square be filled with noise rather than signal, that’s absolutely their choice. but they also may choose for it to be filled with signal rather than noise. the key thing is the site owner should have the choice to give whatever impression they want for their creation.

again, if they want that impression to be hijacked by noisy trolls, they can choose that too.

furyofantares3• 1 month ago

Is this related to my comment in a way I'm not understanding?

ranger_danger2• 24 days ago

Assuming one can keep bots out, I always wondered why people don't just let the users moderate themselves? You could have a system where someone who gets consistently downvoted by enough people eventually just gets muted or kicked/banned for example.

TheAtomic• 1 month ago

This is really cool. Is there anyway to keep some people off my small part of the webverse?

Having read some of the comments, I'd happily use if there was a way to blast (prefarably with a Doom shotgun) some of the miscreants from appearing, but only on my site, and maybe some filters (slurs, etc) that auto-ban them that I can set. Other people could moderate as they will but I'm kind of tired of the toxic people ruining everything.

cauenapier27• 30 days ago

Yeah, there is kicking and ban features. As well as forbidden words.

But I'm also adding more moderation functionalities. Feel free to send me an email with more ideas :D

Nevertheless, in general, the sites using TownSquare are much much quieter then the landing page.

bensyverson• 1 month ago

In case you wanted a comment section but less civilized

AstroJetson• 1 month ago

I messed around some, talked to two people. Watched the birds fly.

I did the "go to next town" It worked, but then I got to (https://emilesilvis.com/) and got stuck. The Town Square is in 1/2 the page, so you can't get to the two ends to be able to go to the next town.

llagerlof• 1 month ago

This is too cool for the current state of humanity.

ghtbircshotbe2• 1 month ago

A couple comments -

Internal link to blog gives 403 https://townsquare.cauenapier.com/blog/

Townsquare is probably not the best name - there are tons of things already with that name

cauenapier27• 30 days ago

Oh noo, thanks to mention it! It was working recently. I'll fix it asap.

Regarding the name, I'm exploring other ideas, but that's not hard.

connollystr• 1 month ago

This is sick!

maarudth• 30 days ago

brilient! i love it.

cauenapier27• 30 days ago

Thanks!

Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites

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