[HN Gopher] Show HN: Sqwok - A social chat alternative to Twitte...
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Show HN: Sqwok - A social chat alternative to Twitter and Reddit
I previously did a Show HN late Dec 2020:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25470672 That was a great
experience and in the past year I continued to develop the site to
bring it to a level of stability and maturity that I felt necessary
for it to have a chance to succeed. Sqwok is all about answering
the question: Can we have better open conversations on the
internet? I wasn't satisfied with the existing means of discussing
topics such as culture, history, politics, and technology through
threaded comments, and was simultaneously impressed with Slack
bringing the IRC experience to the browser for a more general but
enterprise focused audience. I wondered why not create an open
Slack-like chat app for general discussion? Not gamers or
enterprise but rather for people to have open, kitchen-table
discussion on the matters of the day (or just for fun!). I set out
to build this because I wanted to use it myself and felt that
existing chat apps weren't designed for open public discourse in
the way Reddit/Twitter are but for threaded comments & mostly
unidirectional communication. This past year I've been very
grateful to have a group of people continuously show up, offer
support of the site and the idea, encouraging me to continue.
Without those people I would have probably gave up! But alas I
want to see this through and I believe now is the moment to make it
happen. Since the last Show HN I've added: - markdown support in
chat messages, post text, and user bio in profile (soon coming to
full text post). - User profiles including bio, location, photo
avatar, and chronological post listings. - New "who's online" list
that shows the top 10 ppl online and helps steer people to active
conversations. - @mentions now work in posts, user bios, as well
as chat messages. - Email notifications to be alerted when someone
@mentions you. - Settings pages with ability to change password,
delete account, and manage notification settings. - Upgraded image
handling to support higher res photos with upcoming features
allowing enhanced viewing. - Major refactor of the chat handling
to stabilize it and fix many bugs with presence, locations, etc. -
Many improvements to the codebase, frontend, backend, UI, tests,
etc - Updated mobile web UI that drops you straight into the chat
in a single view. - Ability to toggle full width chat view on
desktop. - Live message counts displayed on the post list items
that are updated in realtime. - Updated location handling for
realtime location display. - Backend stability & aggregate
analytics. Through Sqwok and particularly through the last Show HN
I've met & got to know numerous people living across the entire
Earth from Laos to Europe to Africa, all through a silly piece of
software that for some reason seemed like the thing to work on.
Truth be told there is much, much more I want to do with this. I
believe now is the perfect time with the state of existing social
networks and I'm hoping to find more people to support the site and
help drive it to the next level. Let me know if you have any
questions, Thanks!
Author : holler
Score : 79 points
Date : 2022-04-25 20:40 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (sqwok.im)
(TXT) w3m dump (sqwok.im)
| cwkoss wrote:
| Needs some sort of sorting or highlighting of 'upvoted/liked'
| messages.
|
| Afaict this is just a bunch of ad-hoc chatrooms built off user
| generated topics. I am not interested in reading the entire feed
| of strangers' thoughts, give me a way to see the 'best'. Having
| to sift through the uninteresting messages to find the good ones
| is why forums have largely died.
|
| That is the differentiating factor that made Twitter and Reddit
| popular, and you're missing it.
| brightball wrote:
| I like the approach! Since this is HN would you be willing to
| talk about the tech stack at all?
| holler wrote:
| Hey thank you! Yes totally, what would you like to know?
|
| The backend is python/starlette/marshmallow running serverless
| on lambda behind apigateway. It uses many other lambda/sqs
| functions, dynamodb, iot for websockets.
|
| The frontend is an ember.js octane app with ssr via fastboot.js
| in cloudfront lambda@edge.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| What is the approximate load and cost?
| holler wrote:
| It's $150/month right now for 3 aws accounts
| (parent/staging/prod).
| ALittleLight wrote:
| If you increased your usage metrics by 10, 100, 1000 what
| does that do to costs? How many users or messages an hour
| would make it untenable for you to keep hosting?
| reflect wrote:
| I think this a really interesting take on social
| chat/collaboration!
|
| The main reason I closed it was I felt disoriented when I opened
| the threads. Since it brought me to the end of the chat I had to
| scroll to the top to catch up (which has some loading lag) so it
| felt like I had to do too much work to get engaged. Perhaps the
| opening post could be pinned at least?
|
| The other part I got kind of lost with was the lack of a back
| button to return to the topics. Using the browser isn't an issue,
| but the way the UI is presented it seemed like it would be there
| but I didn't see it.
|
| Congrats on a cool project! It's nice to see some fresh takes on
| social.
| holler wrote:
| Hey thank you for the honest feedback and taking the time to
| check it out!
|
| > Since it brought me to the end of the chat I had to scroll to
| the top to catch up (which has some loading lag) so it felt
| like I had to do too much work to get engaged. Perhaps the
| opening post could be pinned at least?
|
| I hadn't thought of pinning the top message once it's been
| buried but that's not a bad idea. Or just adding a "to the top"
| button?
|
| > The other part I got kind of lost with was the lack of a back
| button to return to the topics. Using the browser isn't an
| issue, but the way the UI is presented it seemed like it would
| be there but I didn't see it.
|
| I take it you were on mobile? That's good feedback I have to
| think about.
|
| Thank you!
| zaik wrote:
| Is this built on existing standards for messaging like XMPP or
| ActivityPub?
| ElectronShak wrote:
| This is cool, Loads pretty fast! My two cents are get the or a
| .com. Dono if its just me, but .coms are more memorable.
| holler wrote:
| Thank you! I wanted to get the .com but someone has held onto
| it :/
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Since navigating backwards in browser history resets you to the
| top of the topics view, I would recommend making the UX "cheaper"
| for the user by either (A) tracking scroll-depth for when the
| user navigates back or (B) rendering the chatroom in a modal on
| top of the topics list.
|
| I've been experimenting with (B) a lot lately as a superior UX
| for the user. It makes clicking into individual views ultra-cheap
| since the user can always close the modal and continue scrolling
| with zero downtime.
|
| While we tend to moan about modals done poorly (new Reddit),
| being able to deep dive on this sort of UX is something we get to
| do in rich clients (web clients, phone clients, desktop clients,
| ...) that we can't do when we're stuck rendering statelessly from
| the server. It's a pattern used widely in non-web clients.
|
| Anyways, nice work. The list of features in your OP is not easy.
| planetsprite wrote:
| unappealing name, but interesting ideas
| HypnoDrone wrote:
| I really appreciate the ability to have live chat next to the
| links. Threaded comments like HN are nice but a single flowing
| chat room has it's own perks.
| holler wrote:
| Thank you! Really appreciate it
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| How do you support your site? I hope the venture goes well.
| holler wrote:
| Up to this point it's been fully bootstrapped but I am hoping
| to find a way to work on this full time through an incubator as
| soon as I can. My goal was to push it as far as I could on my
| own to sort of prove the idea out.
|
| I've never done anything like this before so a lot of unknowns!
| [deleted]
| jack_pp wrote:
| I just signed up, will check it out.
|
| First bit of feedback is about the Loading text after sign-up :
| "Reticulating splines.." while it's cool and makes me smile
| inside I do believe it might not cause the same effect to the
| majority of the population. If your goal is to scale beyond HN
| you might consider making it as non-threatening as possible to
| the lay-man
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| As a token lay person, I had to Google that part during signup.
| I second that might be the best approach. Thank you @holler for
| all of the replies.
| prometheus76 wrote:
| Or you could just find a small sense of satisfaction from
| learning about an inside reference aimed at people who played
| the original Sims.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| Do you mean "Sims" as in the specific game "The Sims"? If
| so, you should know that "Reticulating splines" predates
| that by 7 years. It first appeared in SimCity 2000,
| released in 1993.
| holler wrote:
| Hey thanks for the feedback and good point... I think that's an
| artifact from when I first started on the project some time
| ago! Dating myself as a millenial...
|
| Any suggestion for replacement?
| jack_pp wrote:
| I'd say make it as bog-standard as possible, I'd probably go
| just with a loading bar or something but you get the idea.
|
| Another suggestion is to ask people if they want
| notifications to threads they've replied in. It's ok for this
| to be false by default. HN doesn't have this.. the argument
| I've heard is that people want it this way in order to not be
| "wired in" to HN because they feel they spend enough time
| already but not even having the option is not great IMO,
| especially in your case.
|
| You want to give people the option to be wired in to your
| platform, that's the fastest way it will grow. If you want to
| be ethical you can make it as easy as pie to turn off
| notifications for a post. Not sure if you can do this
| straight in the notification or not but at least when they
| follow the notification you can give them a corner screen
| pop-up or something to disable notifications for this post if
| they've set the default settings to always get notified
| sleepyfran wrote:
| To offer a counterpoint I think it's totally fine :)
| "reticulating splines" is one of the loading text that The
| Sims uses, for example, and I can't find a less "niche"
| product than that using it.
|
| Maybe just making the "..." dance to indicate that it's
| loading would remove any doubt that the page is doing
| something for those users that might not understand it. I
| personally love apps that have some charisma!
| holler wrote:
| ah yeah, I've thought that too about the dots.
|
| It has been awhile since I played SimCity 2000! (great
| game)
| sonicggg wrote:
| I disagree. SimCity 4 was a game created for the masses, not
| just HN. It used to have the same nonsense loading screens,
| like "Creating Llama oxygenation". These are honestly more
| common than we imagine. Never seen anyone confused about it.
| Supermancho wrote:
| Having a localstorage list of what topics I've visited most
| recently, that could appear somewhere is something that reddit is
| poor at.
| holler wrote:
| great idea, you wouldnt want that shared between device?
| agilob wrote:
| https://adlrocha.substack.com/p/adlrocha-what-if-we-had-
| loca...
|
| Local first software can still be synced with CRDTs
| holler wrote:
| interesting! hadn't heard of CRDT. I like the concept for
| sure.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| I've got two questions:
|
| 1. Why don't you have a pirate parrot as a logo? Sqwoooook
|
| 2. Are you planning to support the fediverse protocols?
|
| Most newer social networks always aim for decentralization (e.g.
| mastodon instances) and I'm wondering what the USP of squok is -
| compared to say, another mastodon instance. I'm not judging your
| idea, I'm trying to find out why users will use sqwok over say,
| e.g. all the reddit forks that have been started in the past.
|
| Usually people need some unique incentive to migrate to new
| platforms, let it be a safe(r) space or mutual interest.
| holler wrote:
| I think USP for sqwok is a low-friction, intuitive way to hop
| into an instant live conversation with strangers.
|
| I wanted to design it for general open discussion on the web
| from day one.
|
| The language of the site is designed for a general audience as
| opposed to say gaming or enterprise.
| usrn wrote:
| I keep thinking "oh this time people will realize why
| federation is important." This will probably be the fourth
| major event like this where I thought people would be moving to
| Mastodon/Pleroma and instead someone sets up a centralized
| service that goes through all the same stuff again.
| holler wrote:
| For me it's more a matter of "use what you know". The initial
| idea for this sprouted in 2015 and it took awhile to even
| figure out how to build it.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| I guess what mastodon (read as: the fediverse or activitypub)
| would need is a better visualization of community and
| interest discovery.
|
| Every time some instance gets popular it's basically locked
| down afterwards and people tend to forget about it.
| maxerickson wrote:
| Have you revisited your analysis of their motivations and
| choices?
| jancsika wrote:
| > I keep thinking "oh this time people will realize why
| federation is important."
|
| On the flip side-- what if it were the case that Mastodon's
| onboarding, server setup, maintenance, moderation options,
| and overall UX are so poor that it cannot gain traction, even
| when a history of four "major events" would otherwise have
| delivered it a massive userbase by now?
|
| Honestly, even if the interface was constrained to a HN
| aesthetic, if a social media alternative were as fast as git
| and as easy to install and get up and running, I'd use it in
| a heartbeat.
| gman83 wrote:
| The fact that before you can join Mastodon, you first have
| to choose what server you're going to host your account on
| is going to turn off 90% of people right there. They should
| have a default instance you can join from the front page
| and make it an option to join another.
| egypturnash wrote:
| The two instances run by the dev team seem to be
| operating as that to no small extent. They're super
| hammered right now.
|
| It's still a confusing process though. Some kind of "find
| your friends" might help, if we could get people to
| participate in a big database of "this is my Twitter and
| this is/are my Mastodon(s)". Ideally this would be on
| joinmastodon.org along with the instance picker.
| usrn wrote:
| You have to do that with Email too though
| drBonkers wrote:
| What does USP abbreviate?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Unique Selling Proposition
| [deleted]
| LightHugger wrote:
| Can it be indexed by search engines? I feel that this is
| extremely important to differentiate this platform from something
| like discord, and more towards reddit/twitter/forums
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