Town Square, the community deserves connection

29 points by cauenapier a day ago on lobsters | 11 comments

oceanhaiyang | a day ago

That’s a unique idea!

They were not just asking for features. They were playing with it, enjoying it, and saying things like how nice it would be if Town Square had this or that.

They were not just asking for features but were asking for features, lol.

[OP] cauenapier | a day ago

hahahah...lol When I wrote it, it didn't sound like this in my head :P But now I can't unread it.

oceanhaiyang | a day ago

Hahaha :), I think I got your point, they weren't just asking for features randomly but because they were enjoying the application so much they wanted to make it even more enjoyable by expanding it.

Your phrasing made me chuckle though.

mitchellh | 19 hours ago

Wow this is so similar to something I built ~15 years ago (in 2008) I had to double check if the person behind it was the same person I used to work for (its not!). It was still one of my favorite "weird" projects I ever worked on! Time to share!

I was part of a consultancy in 2008 that was hired to build this persons MVP idea for a startup. The idea was a Firefox (the largest browser at the time) plugin that created a live social network based on domain. When you visited "example.com", everyone that was also there [and had the plugin] would show up.

In the plugin, we drew it as a side-scrolling world, just like this! And we rendered everyone as a little stick figure, just like this!

You could form parties, and when you joined a party, you could "surf" the internet together: when one person changed that tab's address, everyone went with them. You had both domain-level and party-level chat.

The tech behind it was cool too, we built it on top of XMPP (completely). The entire project was ejabberd + custom Erlang modules for the realtime stuff. The persistent backend stuff (i.e. not chat) was standard Rails API. I "ported" jQuery to work with Firefox's XUL, and the plugin was implemented with jQuery. The web and available technologies was different back then. We didn't have Websockets for example so everything was long-polling.

Anyways, fun to see this idea pop back up in a modern way. :)

radio | a day ago

This is cool but doesn't generate real connection.

[OP] cauenapier | a day ago

Probably not right now on high traffic. It's a bit too crowded. but I did create wonderful connections with some visitors these days. Some other site owners reported the same already, on quieter blogs.

naiveai | a day ago

Well, given that you admit it was mostly vibecoded, the feeling of genuine human connection is substantially lessened.

apromixately | a day ago

So, people cannot use this to connect because it was coded with AI? Would you even have known from using it?

We don't generally reply with memes around here but here have a confused fillion https://media.tenor.com/cH9gfgKqp-cAAAAd/umm-wait.gif

junon | a day ago

Cute, I like it. Seems pretty well-made too.

[OP] cauenapier | a day ago

Thaaanks :) It was a lot of fun working on it

Sounded interesting. I joined the demo to find everyone was either named “dick” or “balls” (using various Unicode tricks to make the names unique) and were shouting about their penis sizes. What else did I expect?

To be clear, that’s not a knock on the project or the creators, just sadness about the state of things