tl;dr: The author built "Town Square," a tiny widget that appears at the bottom of a webpage showing stick-figure avatars of current visitors, who can walk around, see what others are reading, and chat ephemerally with no accounts or history. It's now open source with a public server available, so other sites can embed it without self-hosting. Future plans include connecting adjacent sites' Town Squares together, webring-style, so visitors can walk between them.