One hundred towns on the map

Less then 2 weeks ago, TownSquare was mostly an idea and a handful of early adopters willing to try something a little odd: a tiny shared space on an otherwise ordinary website, where visitors could see each other, wander around and say hello.

That idea has grown faster than we expected.

Today there are 100 verified TownSquares on the map. One hundred small public squares scattered across personal blogs, project pages, and quiet corners of the internet. Together they have exchanged 328,672 messages. The open-source project has picked up 347 GitHub stars in two weeks, which still feels surreal for a side project about waving at strangers on the web.

We wanted to take a moment to say thank you, share a few numbers, and point at some of the lovely things happening between these towns.

Better Web — a quote from a visitor during the HN spike

A world that keeps growing

The TownSquare map is the part that still makes me smile every time I open it. Each verified site appears as its own little town in a shared landscape. Walk around and you can hop between them, peek into other people's squares, and get a sense of how many inhabited places are out there.

The map is not just growing in headcount. More site owners are linking their towns together with signposts, directional markers at the edge of a square that let visitors walk straight into a neighbour's site. Traffic is starting to flow along those paths: as of today, signpost links have been clicked 2,005 times. Someone lands on one blog, wanders to the signpost, and ends up somewhere they would never have found on their own. That is exactly the kind of small-web wandering we hoped for.

We only recently started counting clicks on the map itself, to see how much traffic it sends to each town. In just a couple of days, we have already recorded 300 clicks. People are opening the map, poking around, and finding TownSquares they did not know existed, all over the world.

When the squares got busy

We had a few very busy days. The public demo on the landing page and the square on cauenapier.com both filled up. TownSquare hit the Hacker News front page three times across two weekends. Lots of people showed up at once, discovered TownSquare, played around, and seemed to be having a genuinely good time.

Imprompty HackerNews friendly meeting

Not everyone was there in good faith. Some visitors were just poking at the system, testing limits, probing moderation, spamming chat, being rude. That comes with the territory when a big crowd shows up at once. We also had to fight off hordes of bots, and we learned a lot about keeping them out along the way.

We are really sorry to the kind people who joined during those spikes and had to wade through all of that to find the fun. Since then, we have added moderation tools and put site owners in charge of how their square is run. You can decide what gets filtered, who gets blocked, and how strictly they want to keep things. Painful weekend to live through, but every TownSquare is a bit safer today because of it.

Kind words from around the web

We have been quietly delighted by a few mentions lately.

Blog posts and new squares

A few people went further and wrote their own take, or added a square to their site:

• Dense Discovery — issue #395
• Manual do Mundo - Links legais da semana (Brazilian website)
• Bongo Twisty — I added "TownSquare" to my blog
• Newsonaut — This way to the town square
• ThinkRoot — TownSquare: când nu ești singur pe pagină
• Kev Quirk — Adding a Town Square
• Pete Ashton — Notes and links from Thur 18 June
• Matt Fantinel — "This is so cool!"
• Kiko.io - TownSquare - Chatting with Strangers
• Lab Notes - Weekend Reading — It's gettin' hot in here …

Link roundups and discussions

Newsletters, link blogs, and forums that passed TownSquare along:

• kottke.org
• Lobsters — Lobsters Repost
• Hacker News — first discussion that hit frontpage
• 32-Bit Café

Wrote about TownSquare somewhere we missed? Get in touch and we will add you to this list.

If you linked your town to a neighbour, or just stopped by to say hello in someone's square, thank you. This project only works because people are willing to make their sites feel a little more inhabited.

A cousin on another planet

Not everyone is building the same kind of square and that is part of the fun.

The Promenade took the TownSquare idea, rewrote it for their own site, and ran with it. Jetpacks. Tents. A bunch of other touches we had not thought of. But the part that really stopped us in our tracks is how visitors interact with the page itself: characters can walk across the actual text, hop between headings, and treat the paragraphs like solid ground. It is an awesome idea, and the implementation is brilliant.

It feels like the first TownSquare on another planet. Different from ours, but clearly sharing the same genetics. Go take a stroll.

What is next

We are still building in the open. More towns are being founded daily, more signposts are going up, and we have a few features in the works that we will share here as they land.

In the meantime: add a square to your site, explore the map, or read the docs if you want to see what all the waving is about.

See you in the square.