Maximal Operators for cube skeletons

We study discretized maximal operators associated to averaging over (neighborhoods of) squares in the plane and, more generally, $k$-skeletons in $\mathbb{R}^n$. Although these operators are known not to be bounded on any $L^p$, we obtain nearly sharp $L^p$ bounds for every small discretization scale. These results are motivated by, and partially extend, recent results of T. Keleti, D. Nagy and P. Shmerkin, and of R. Thornton, on sets that contain a scaled $k$-sekeleton of the unit cube with center in every point of $\mathbb{R}^n$.