[HN Gopher] Show HN: Soapbox - drop-in audio for casual conversa...
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Show HN: Soapbox - drop-in audio for casual conversation with
strangers
Author : decanus
Score : 42 points
Date : 2021-03-10 16:51 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (soapbox.social)
(TXT) w3m dump (soapbox.social)
| ceresstation wrote:
| Love the focus on casual specifically, I feel apps like Clubhouse
| really emphasize the "on stage" vs. "off stage" dynamic which can
| lead to some really frustrating status seeking behavior (e.g.
| chiming in to show off vs. out of genuine interest or care).
| Excited to see where this goes!
| denysvitali wrote:
| I'm so sad to see iPhone-first applications. Can we please have
| web versions first, and later on all the platform specific apps?
| K7PJP wrote:
| It's like ham radio without the radio. Or Clubhouse without the
| influencers or NFT talk.
| kawfey wrote:
| As a ham, my thoughts exactly. Probably with a lot less talk
| about ailments, the weather, and antennas though.
| decanus wrote:
| Hi everyone, my name is Dean. I am the founder of the Soapbox. I
| launched this iOS App as a tool to casually talk to strangers or
| friends on your own time. I came to work on Soapbox after I
| experienced other social audio apps that started to detract from
| recreating the experience of meeting new people in real life.
|
| I launched Soapbox with the intention of creating a more casual
| and spontaneous social audio app, that contains interactive
| features for a more fun experience. I figured keeping the app
| uncluttered and collecting minimal data, users would be more
| spontaneous with the app and use it however makes them the
| happiest. The difference between Soapbox and other social audio
| apps are sixteen-person room sizes, no social hierarchy in rooms
| (all users can mute/unmute by default), and our interactive
| features. Anyone in a room can drop a link which will create a
| preview for everyone to see or react to the conversation with
| emojis, and admins can add in a game, poll, or other interactive
| components directly into rooms.
|
| Soapbox is mainly written in Go and uses WebRTC for streaming
| audio, we currently do not use 3rd party services other than a
| TURN server hosted by Twilio for our users behind a firewall. The
| go WebRTC server is based on some of the amazing work done by the
| Pion crew. We recently launched Soapbox Minis and built an open-
| source SDK (https://github.com/SoapboxSocial/minis.js) so
| developers can build Minis that interact with live Soapbox rooms,
| this is still very early and actively in development.
| bithavoc wrote:
| Congrats on your launch, it's a pretty great experience. The X
| button has to go away though, it's a weird behavior that I'm
| trying to do other things in the app and it kicks me out of the
| conversation.
|
| Other than that it works pretty great.
| decanus wrote:
| Hey thanks! yeah we need to make that more intuitive, the x
| button is to leave the room, but you can swipe down to hide
| that view.
| olah_1 wrote:
| Seeing that privacy is a big concern with Clubhouse (not just
| taking contact data, but also recording convos and who knows
| what they do with them), is Soapbox implemented in a more
| privacy preserving manner?
|
| I'm not sure what can be done regarding e2e encryption when
| we're talking about WebRTC and TURN, but I would love to hear
| your take on this.
| decanus wrote:
| We take privacy insanely seriously, my prior job was actually
| as a privacy preserving messaging protocol researcher. WebRTC
| is by default encrypted. Right now its not e2e encrypted due
| to bandwidth constraints, but we are working on adding this
| to the app. Additionally we do not require you to share your
| phone numbers or your contact list in order to use the app.
| stunt wrote:
| You can't have a group voice chat service without recording.
| They will knock your door soon if you do.
|
| There are just so much surveillance related regulations that
| I can't believe that's possible. I have first hand experience
| when I worked in the Telecom industry. Regulators do not
| ignore any platform with substantial traffic.
| gadders wrote:
| This reminds me of the early 80's in the UK. I think for
| 50p/minute or something you could dial a telephone number that
| was essentially a group chat. Some kids at my school did it from
| the school library which didn't make them very popular with the
| authorities.
| decanus wrote:
| Yeah a couple of friends told me it reminds them of those, I
| think they were called party lines!
| Siecje wrote:
| A party line was a home phone that was shared with your
| neighbours. If your neighbour was on the phone and you picked
| it up you would join their conversation. So you could pick up
| the phone and listen in.
|
| You had your own ring so you would know when the phone was
| for you, but it would always ring. For example your ring
| could be two short and two long.
| Siecje wrote:
| Is an Android version planned? What about web?
| decanus wrote:
| Yeah android is definitely gonna be worked on, we wanted to get
| iOS right first. We were thinking about web but aren't sure
| about it just yet!
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(page generated 2021-03-11 23:02 UTC)