Ask ten people to define "small town" and you'll get ten different population cutoffs, most of them contradicting each other the moment a specific place gets mentioned. Is a walkable neighborhood inside a mid-sized city a small town? Is a 40,000-person college town? The population-threshold approach breaks down fast, which is part of why we don't use it as the organizing idea for this site.
What actually seems to hold the category together isn't size, it's legibility. A small town, in the sense that matters, is a place you can hold in your head — where the mental map of "everything I need" fits inside a walk or a short drive, where enough of the same faces show up often enough that a version of familiarity builds in, and where the local decisions (a new development, a school board vote, a Main Street storefront changing hands) are things residents actually hear about and have opinions on.
By that definition, a dense, walkable slice of a bigger city can feel more "small town" than a spread-out exurb of 8,000 people connected by nothing but arterial roads and parking lots. It's also why we organize this whole site around archetypes — Coastal Charmer, Mountain Hideaway, College Town Energy — rather than a strict population cutoff. The feeling is the thing that transfers; the number on a census page mostly isn't.
If you're using the quiz or the guides to think through a move, it's worth applying the same test to any town you're seriously considering: can you picture the whole thing in your head after a few visits? If yes, you're probably looking at a real small town, whatever the population sign says on the way in.