Check out this Town Square concept. When you visit a blog post, you get a stick person version of yourself that can interact with other visitors. The down side is that it can be dull if no one else is around.
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Everyone wants to reinvent MMO lobbies it seems. I’m reminded of Matt Webb’s cursor party and The Internet Has No Benches.
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I’m also reminded of cursors park and cursor camp.
Thematically, I’m also reminded of this essay on Ambient Co-presence.
But I kinda wonder if these kinds of ideas “belong” on the small web. These are all trying to help us “feel” the presence of others online, which I think is also a goal of the small web, but the small web partially achieves this by rejecting algorithms and, thus, limiting a site/person’s reach on purpose. I like this and it really makes the web feel more human-scaled. But it also means you’re unlikely to have the presence of other readers at the same time, and in any case you’re hopefully already seeing people frequently enough for them to be more meaningful than an anonymous cursor.
To generalize a little further: I think these attempts at recreating third spaces online are failing to capture what makes third places “work”. Our dark forests are already just as third place-y as these experiments, but we’ve had them for years and they’re clearly not fulfilling the role third places do in IRL collectivist areas.
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I just think this is lowkey a small scale fun idea. Idk if bro is trying to make a third space. Like I don’t think anyone is going to go on the page to see the stickmen it’s just a little fun addition.
Also aren’t third spaces like places you can go to which u don’t need to pay for and can hang out with others? So like doesn’t discord count then or twitch even idk bro im just yapping and im so tired
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Not needing to spending money is a nice to have, but considering bars were considered third spaces, I don’t think that’s a core requirement.
Even if it’s not explicitly trying to make a third place, I think any attempt at making you “feel” the presence of others online is an act of creating third places.
And yes, I think dark forests like small private discord servers count as third places. And these dark forests have existed almost as long as the internet has.
My message did come across as dismissing these related projects as ineffective at moving society towards a more empathetic and collectivist state. Not every project has to change the world, ofc, and it’s a fun little experimental project that doesn’t do any harm, and that’s enough.
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The reaction I’ve seen so far is mainly that people think it’s fun. I could see where the novelty might wear off, though. Much will depend on what other features he adds. One of the requests from users was the ability to jump. Another was to have birds. The ability to run and jump after the birds seemed to bring a lot of joy. It’s definitely tapping into something, but I’m not sure what.
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I’ve seen some folks apply the third place concept to the web before, and I have some reservations about that. The concept of the third place, i.e. a place for people to congregate that is not the home or the workplace, originated specifically in order to talk about how come these places are disappearing and why their absence is detrimental. If you’re talking about that issue in relation to the web, I figure that can go one of two ways. Either you define a third place specifically in terms of physical space, in which case none of the web counts anyway, or you’re left with a definition so expansive that it includes even Facebook, which I think a lot of folks wouldn’t want either.
Then again, maybe the idea of “you can just hang out without making it about your career” really is an idea that some folks need to hear. Sometimes I do get the impression of something of a divide between the rest of the indie web and the necktie indie web, if you know what I mean.
Anyway, if folks wanted to make little novelty projects like this because they just think they’re neat, that would be one thing, but in this case as well as in the Benches article shared last time, these projects are getting contextualized in terms of a larger narrative about loneliness and social connection:
The internet feels strangely empty, despite all the new content being published everywhere. It is crowded, but lonely. I can’t really feel the human presence as I used to. I miss opening some random forum or public chat and finding other people who might share the same interests. I wanted my site to feel more alive. So I decided to build a town square for my site, where serendipity can bring people together and let them chat.
I wanted presence, not a social network. Something lightweight and temporary. A small reminder that there are other people here too.
You open the site and see a few other visitors wandering around at the bottom of the page.
Maybe someone says hello. Maybe nobody talks at all.
Either way, the site feels inhabited. It’s a little space on the internet where people can chat, like a small café, or a small town square.
I believe that feeling lonely in the crowd on mainstream social networks is a real and serious problem that can be addressed, and I’m not sold on these novelty chatrooms as the best solution.
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I mean, I think this isn’t presented as a grand solution, though 
. This is just a little fun thing of comfort on this person’s website; it isn’t claiming to solve anything. Just something small the person thought they could do for their website to combat this in some infinitesimal way.
It’s recontextualised in this narrative of loneliness as a reason why the person made it, something to harken back too. I mean, the dude even says themselves maybe nobody is probably gonna talk at all.
A small reminder that there are other people here too.
Maybe it isn’t a solution, but it’s sweet that the person thought of it, and it should be acknowledged as that. A small thing they made, so that their website can feel connected.
I have a cbox on my home page for the same reason, it’s nice to know people are there looking at my site! nobody is ever on at the same time to chat but its still sweet u know? I kind of did put it on their because my homepage was lonely and I wanted it to feel more connected. Same as this dude.
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