I'm building sqwok.im, a new open discussion site that mixes real time messaging with news aggregation.
I started building this because I wanted an open website for discussing news, science, technology, politics, and other general topics in a modern experience like Slack, with features built for the general user and not enterprise or gaming. I grew up hanging out on aol chat, irc, icq, aim, etc and with those experiences in mind, I'd like sqwok to be minimal, simple, and approachable for non-tech users.
Currently the site works on both mobile and desktop web and supports multiple concurrent logins. That means you can have multiple tabs open and/or be logged in on a phone and desktop at the same time, and the real time features should work.
The core differentiator for Sqwok is that it's built from the ground up for real time. The site is built around real time conversations that are both ephemeral and long-lived -- all posts include a built-in full-featured chat room.
Have something on your mind or what to discuss the latest news? Simply create a post, share the url with anyone, and they will instantly be able to open it, see the active real time conversation, see who is currently in the conversation, and begin talking with a few clicks. The conversation can be rejoined at any time. It also includes the ability to @mention other users and send them an instant in-app notification to join you.
Recently added is a "follow" feature that allows you to follow another user, and then when they are online and in conversation(s), to both see where they are and join them instantly. This lets you find your friends and join them in conversation at any time.
To keep the site razor focused on actual conversation, I've opted to exclude any form of voting. Instead, relevance for "trending" is based on a combination of real time chat activity and time decay. I have further ideas I'd like to explore here to add options for how people find content, but the goal is to mimic the real world as much as possible, and keep the focus on building rich conversations versus invisible feedback loops.
One particular use case that's come up for this is using it to watch YouTube live streams outside of YouTube, or in the case where the YouTube stream has chat disabled, such as the example below. Feel free to try it out by creating a post and simply include the url for the YouTube stream in the post title.
I'm building sqwok.im, a new open discussion site that mixes real time messaging with news aggregation.
I started building this because I wanted an open website for discussing news, science, technology, politics, and other general topics in a modern experience like Slack, with features built for the general user and not enterprise or gaming. I grew up hanging out on aol chat, irc, icq, aim, etc and with those experiences in mind, I'd like sqwok to be minimal, simple, and approachable for non-tech users.
Currently the site works on both mobile and desktop web and supports multiple concurrent logins. That means you can have multiple tabs open and/or be logged in on a phone and desktop at the same time, and the real time features should work.
The core differentiator for Sqwok is that it's built from the ground up for real time. The site is built around real time conversations that are both ephemeral and long-lived -- all posts include a built-in full-featured chat room.
Have something on your mind or what to discuss the latest news? Simply create a post, share the url with anyone, and they will instantly be able to open it, see the active real time conversation, see who is currently in the conversation, and begin talking with a few clicks. The conversation can be rejoined at any time. It also includes the ability to @mention other users and send them an instant in-app notification to join you.
Recently added is a "follow" feature that allows you to follow another user, and then when they are online and in conversation(s), to both see where they are and join them instantly. This lets you find your friends and join them in conversation at any time.
To keep the site razor focused on actual conversation, I've opted to exclude any form of voting. Instead, relevance for "trending" is based on a combination of real time chat activity and time decay. I have further ideas I'd like to explore here to add options for how people find content, but the goal is to mimic the real world as much as possible, and keep the focus on building rich conversations versus invisible feedback loops.
I've created a post on sqwok for this post on HN: https://sqwok.im/p/TE22DNgTPn5P9g
One particular use case that's come up for this is using it to watch YouTube live streams outside of YouTube, or in the case where the YouTube stream has chat disabled, such as the example below. Feel free to try it out by creating a post and simply include the url for the YouTube stream in the post title.
https://sqwok.im/p/SpGrYgY-vZ0haA
If you have any questions or comments please let me know, thank you!