Houseparty’s founder launches Towns, an open source group chat web app and protocol

After launching a pair of well-loved but ultimately star-crossed social apps, Ben Rubin is going all-in on decentralization.

Rubin previously founded Meerkat and Houseparty — apps that pioneered mobile livestreaming and group video chat, respectively — shaping massive social trends in their earliest stages. After working on Slashtalk, an “anti-meeting tool” for the workplace, Rubin is now back to working on consumer apps, albeit in a roundabout way.

These days, Rubin’s vision for social media bears little resemblance with the colorful, user-friendly apps he’s known for popularizing. He’s clearly internalized the lessons of Meerkat’s unfortunate demise and Houseparty’s premature pre-pandemic death-by-acquisition via Epic Games. Rubin is something of a Web3 true believer now, happy to weather the frenzied speculative investment cycles and Sam Bankman-Frieds while holding out hope that the underlying technologies can still unlock a better future for some aspects of the web.

Rubin is currently running Here Not There Labs — “a team of web3 creators dropping projects as we go.” Brian Meek, a longtime former Microsoft employee who worked on Skype’s mobile app, serves as the company’s co-founder and CTO.

Their new project is Towns, a protocol and a web-based chat app designed to facilitate self-owned, self-governed online communities. Because web3, there’s also a crypto component, so Towns will likely initially appeal much more to enthusiasts in that community than the average app store-goer like his past projects.

Out of the gate, Here Not There Labs has picked up a $25.5 million Series A round from a16z Crypto, which joins its existing backers Benchmark and Framework Ventures. It’s also picked up the Towns.com domain (for the low, low price of a couple hundred thousand dollars), a point of pride for Rubin and a mark of his plans for a long game.

“This is not just a crypto project — this is a new way of thinking about social networking as a network that is owned and operated by its constituents,” Rubin told TechCrunch. “And I think that's very exciting to me, especially coming from the experience I had with Meerkat and then Houseparty, where a lot of us didn’t want to sell... But we didn’t govern our own product at [that] point and that's a product that got to 150 million users.”

The Towns protocol will offer users an Ethereum-based smart contracts system (think miniature programs that live on and are executed through the blockchain) and end-to-end encrypted chat. Here Not There Labs says Towns’ smart contracts that are “extensible, composable, and upgradeable” and will ultimately empower communities to draft their own rules for who gets to participate, what is allowed and how and if they’ll monetize. The Towns backend will run on a relatively centralized proof-of-authority algorithm initially while the team builds out the protocol and will then move to a proof-of-stake system à la Ethereum 2.0 in time.