Show HN: Soapbox – drop-in audio for casual conversation with strangers | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Soapbox – drop-in audio for casual conversation with strangers

soapbox.social

49 pointsdecanus25 comments

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.

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.

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.

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.

Wait why would recording be required for regulations? Is that a law??

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.

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.

Awesome. I’m a semi fan of clubhouse but the large rooms and hierarchy is off putting. I’ll try you out

Yeah, if you think that the I think soapbox may be right for you!

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!

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.

Yeah a couple of friends told me it reminds them of those, I think they were called party lines!

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.

Oh! Eight! Nine! One! Fifty! Fifty! Fifty!

Yes!

I phoned this once when I found a phone box that had a bug that 20p turned into 5 quid on the lcd.

Man the chat line was crap it was like a voicemail on loop and super slow to keep you on the call for ages.

Much better was the tango doll which I also got via that phone but only 1 of the 3 came!

Looks neat! I wanted to try this type of app but Clubhouse is too full of NFT scams and influencers. Any plans for an iPad app?

Hey, the app should work on ipad, we are thinking about how to optimize for it too.

Is an Android version planned? What about web?

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!

It's like ham radio without the radio. Or Clubhouse without the influencers or NFT talk.

As a ham, my thoughts exactly. Probably with a lot less talk about ailments, the weather, and antennas though.

I'm so sad to see iPhone-first applications. Can we please have web versions first, and later on all the platform specific apps?

We produce a web-audio app (does recording). Apple has made it almost impossible for this to work as a web app on the iPhone (no officially blessed way to record in the browser). So we support computer browsers and Android with browser. Likely could be done as a hybrid app.

I'm an iPhone dev, I'd have never been able to do this in the web sadly.

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