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.