holler

> and just want to get to the end now.

There should be a button that appears when you've scrolled up that says "return to bottom", but agree need the reverse to jump to the top!

Maybe just a simple "Home" link in the global header next to the logo?

sorry about that! It's in my list of stories pretty high up so hopefully it'll be there soon. Thanks for checking it out!

Interesting!

It's using aws pinpoint for transactional email, have you ever encountered that before from other sites?

Thank you, I appreciate it!

The site isn't open source, although I've thought maybe parts of it could be later.

The reason for the blank space is I originally was coming from an angle of news consumption where you could see the meta information of an article, images, summary, etc, alongside a live conversation such as here: https://sqwok.im/p/Q8OggZt9zQX4iA

But when a post is just text it doesn't make as much sense... maybe it could auto calibrate for text only posts? Need to think about it, but thank you for the feedback!

That's why I didn't include any voting at all in the site. That said I think it'd be nice to have a way to somehow highlight message(s) within a post, so anyone can get a sort of run-down on key moments of the conversation. It's something we've discussed but haven't settled on a way to implement yet.

I agree there should be a way to highlight top messages, and we've discussed it on the site a few times. Just haven't come up with the implementation yet!

My main goal was getting the core chat piece working solid before building stuff around it, but I appreciate the feedback and hear you!

lol! I'd love to once I figure out how to.

To be honest I'm not sure off the top of my head, lambda/dynamo/s3/iot scale quite a bit. Opensearch is one of the most costly services but I have it behind apigateway cache.

interesting! hadn't heard of CRDT. I like the concept for sure.

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.

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!

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.

It's $150/month right now for 3 aws accounts (parent/staging/prod).

Thank you! I wanted to get the .com but someone has held onto it :/

great idea, you wouldnt want that shared between device?

ah yeah, I've thought that too about the dots.

It has been awhile since I played SimCity 2000! (great game)

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!

Thank you! Really appreciate it

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.

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?

I'm building https://sqwok.im

Just posted it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31160302

How cool!

I happened to take a JSX flight from Seattles Boeing Field to Oakland maybe two years ago and it was a really enjoyable experience.

The terminal at Boeing Field is a sort of old historic building and it was set up such that you essentially walked in, checked in at a small counter and then walked out the back door to board the plane that was sitting outside on the tarmac.

The ride was smooth and overall I'd do it again except that they later cancelled that route.

Compelling product > advertised speech philosophy.

Are there any serious social networks who overtly advertise as anti-free speech? Making speech the hook when the site looks like a third-rate ripoff of Twitter isn't a winning strategy.

Lots of people, and I think the narrative that they died when instagram copied stories is sort of bogus. I know way more people who use and have used snapchat than who use Twitter. - Millenial

I'd recommend learning raw cloudformation first since it's the primitive cdk compiles to & being able to read/understand it will give someone full confidence of their stack.

> You will be rejected literally by tens of potential sponsors until one says yes (hang in there!)

That's not true at all, but it's a club with millions of people. Other than that appreciate your breakdown.

What would be the use case for this?

Why would they? What would they gain from that?

> Unless you design from the ground up to avoid hot partitions

How would you do that? Dynamodb is super cheap and fast to get going with so I use it frequently.

In some ways a hot partition sounds like a quality problem!

I learned a lot building https://sqwok.im and am currently building a brand new project using most of the same stack (use what you know!).

The project calls for a consumer mobile app with an administrative web app.

The stack:

- Cloudformation all the things (front/back/deploy/routing/etc)

- Python Starlette rest api

- Dynamodb

- Cognito (not using their web ui)

- Ember.js for the web app

- React-native for the mobile app

Using whatever tech you're familiar with is the best bet to getting a project off the ground quickly in my opinion.