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Collaborate / engage directly with high-profile websites on playhtml interactions to get exposure to their audience baseCreate infrastructure and templates that are easily customizable and a good first step into playhtml interactions.
partner with friends and web creatorpartner with indie web website making servicesdo one-off, seasonal popups to mimic real-world pop-up culture and build spread?
Passive + aggregate + persistent = the space has soul and history even when empty (visit counters, scroll distance)Passive + individual + persistent = specific people's traces linger in the space (fingerprints, ghost paths)Passive + individual + ephemeral = the space feels alive right now without anyone trying (live cursors)Active + individual + persistent = people chose to invest themselves in the space (guestbooks, signatures)
A plant/tree that sprouts new branches with visitsA wall that fills with paint splatters or brush strokesA constellation that gains new starsA pile of stones (like a cairn)A candle burning lowerA stone path getting smoother/more wornPaint chipping away to reveal something underneathA door handle getting shinier from useBackground color drifting slowly across a spectrumA gradient that warms up with more visitsWeather that changes based on activitySeasons that advancewhat did they do? upvotes, reactions → wear on elements, touch heatmap, etc.ghost cursorsfingerprintswear and tear (how do you show this?)interactions that enable visitors to leave something that fades away over time“X days since site has been opened / closed / touched / maintained”“This site has consumed 523 minutes of attention”cursor distance traveled, scroll distance travelednumber of links clicked
who is here? cursors / live chatDifferent time scales:current pageopen pagepage recently openedpage closed for a whilecolor traces (ala kinopio)an aura or gradient (incorporated into background of site)an ephemeral image of the other person fades in and out as you get close to them (ala Sky or other video games with this)
community hackathonintegrating with popular websites and partnersneal agarwal, matt webb, (future) integrate with AI to make it easier to create your first playhtml elements?Who are important communities to reach?internet enthusiasts who don’t identify as developers (”html energy,” no frameworks, programming as a way to express themselves)hobbyist developers building small tools (programmer by trade, uses React or another modern javascript framework)creative agencies who are contracted to build company and professional sites (sanctuary.computer)new media art folks who want to make interesting art experiences (NEW INC)programming and design students (what would a syllabus around communal web experiences look like?)strong-knit communities who have a desire for small gathering spaces for their own use (DIY nextdoor)
Distribution & Templates
GOAL: make playhtml spread across the internet by making it fun to surf the web again.
Our strategy relies on grassroots distribution across the web by having more and more sites incorporate playhtml interactions with sublte attribution back to it. See mmm.page’s attribution for inspiration. To do this, we have to:
Current Context
playhtml’s current community straddles those who care about a more human-focused internet (mostly hobbyists and website enthusiasts) and those who keep up with the latest developer tools. playhtml has received really positive and emotional reception from sharing it online and everyone I’ve showed it to. Comments include feelings around breaking their mind about what you can do on the internet and how it feels like pure magic. However, only a few people that I know of have created sites using playhtml, even as I’ve been doing more to promote and encourage this.
My hypothesis is that the disconnect between what kinds of experiences playhtml enables and what kinds of experiences we’re used to on the internet proves to be too big of a hurdle for people getting started. When they see what you can do with it, they are very excited about the possibilities, but I don’t think they know exactly what to use it for, given how different it is from what we normally experience. The end effect of integrating playhtml is also often unclear in the simplest cases because you don’t see what other people see on their computer when they visit your website. So making something communal (like a button on your website) will not be immediately apparent how it changes the experience (which is something that is incredibly prized in the development of websites).
playhtml is only successful if it reaches a broader community and influences our culture for using the internet. The rise in popularity of multiplayer video games and collaborative creative tools like Figma provides a suitable foundation to reach people who are questioning how the internet might look different if it were more multiplayer and shared by default. The collective yearning for more third spaces in physical communities and a general dismay in how our devices affect us also inform a base need that playhtml can speak to.
Collaborations
Mechanisms
We should take inspiration from the interactive elements that are most popular and initially desired for people when they create a social website
A framework for social presence in digital spaces
The key insight is that a truly lived-in digital space isn't built from one type of social interaction — it requires ingredients from all four quadrants of two axes:
Passive → Active (intentionality: did you choose to leave a trace?) Aggregate → Individual (identity resolution: how much of a specific person comes through?)
With inhabited vs. active (persistent vs. ephemeral) as a third dimension encoded in color — not a separate axis because it's less a design choice and more an emergent property of the other two.
The four ingredients a lived-in space needs:
The most important design insight: the same technical feature can serve different quadrants depending on how it's designed. A guestbook and a live chatroom can run on identical playhtml infrastructure but produce completely different felt experiences — one says "leave something and go," the other says "stay and respond." This means playhtml's job isn't to prescribe which quadrant a feature lives in, but to give people the primitives to design across all of them.
Relevance to "we were online": Most existing social platforms live entirely in the active + sought half of this space — you go looking for people, you choose to post. "We were online" is deliberately building the other half: passive traces, stumbled encounters, presence that accumulates without anyone trying. But the framework suggests the full vision requires all four ingredients — the ephemeral cursor encounters are the entry point, but they need to accumulate into something persistent and individual (guestbooks, fingerprints, self-portraits) to make the space feel truly inhabited rather than just occasionally alive.
The phases of rollout in the project doc already reflect this intuitively: self-portrait first (passive + individual + persistent), then live presence (passive + individual + ephemeral), then active contribution (active + individual + persistent). Each phase adds a new ingredient.
ASYNC
who was here?
who are the people who have been here?
Familiar: visit/view count, number of visitors, number of likes on a post, # sold, # of people with this in their cart
Thread 1: Shared accumulation objects — a single thing that visibly changes as more people interact. The appeal is that every visitor contributes to something communal and the result is visible even when you're alone.
Additive accumulation — things that grow:
Subtractive accumulation — things that wear down:
Transformative accumulation — things that shift:
Who are they?
what are the people who come here like? what kind of person comes here? how do they treat the space?
Familiar: guestbook, visitor log, comments, DMs, contact form
Thread 2: Individual expression/identity — ways for visitors to leave something personal, not just anonymous. Guestbooks, cursor walls, reactions that feel like "I was here" rather than just incrementing a number.
SYNC
Who is here now?
Familiar: real-time cursors, live chat
Who are they?
Other Outreach Strategies
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