Town Square: an open-source widget that shows live visitors as stick figures

A developer has open-sourced Town Square, a lightweight widget that drops a small interactive strip at the bottom of any web page. Each current visitor appears as a stick figure, and people can see which page others are reading, move around, and exchange messages in real time — for instance, striking up a conversation with someone reading the same article. The aim isn’t another social network but a revival of the older web’s sense that real people are on the other side of the screen.

The design is deliberately minimal and ephemeral: no accounts, profiles, follower counts, or stored chat logs. Messages persist only as long as participants are present to read them. After requests from others wanting the feature on their own sites, the author released the code on GitHub and stood up a public server, so site owners can either self-host or register their site to use the hosted version without running infrastructure.

Planned additions include richer character interactions and a better chat experience, plus a more ambitious idea: linking one site’s Town Square to a neighbor’s, so visitors could walk to the edge of a page and cross into another participating site — effectively a real-time, spatial take on the classic webring.