Show HN: Sqwok – A social chat alternative to Twitter and Reddit

[holler]

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!

[hombre_fatal]

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.

[holler]

Hey thanks for the feedback, I agree with you and I've thought about that problem and ways to potentially solve it.

I was thinking it'd be nice to have a way to render a route, or maybe it's just in a modal as you say, and keep it around while you navigate other parts of the app. That way you can pop it back to the top when needed and it maintains state and doesn't need to rerender.

Is that sort of what you are talking about? Sounds like you've implemented it with success? Def sounds appealing!

Thank you for the comments, appreciated!

[reflect]

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]

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!

[cwkoss]

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 Reddit and Twitter (implemented eventually) popular, and you're missing it.

[holler]

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!

[jimkleiber]

Would you be more interested in reading a feed/chat of the thoughts of a select few people? In other words, if the chat thread creator could restrict who could chat, so the feed doesn't get so overwhelmed? Almost like a text-based version of Clubhouse?

[iinnPP]

I feel like this is the kind of thing that leads to the extreme political divides we, hopefully, all hate.

It promotes the same clickbait ragebait mentality that ads do.

[gunapologist99]

> Needs some sort of sorting or highlighting of 'upvoted/liked' messages.

Also known as an algorithmic "feed"?

[cookiengineer]

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.

[usrn]

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.

[sjmm1989]

> 1. Why don't you have a pirate parrot as a logo? Sqwoooook

It is apt that this is the number 1 question; because it is a very important one. I want to know this too OP.

As per the rest of your comment to OP; I agree with your premise. It's a good question to ask. I remember when Reddit was still new and Digg was the place to be for some random news. And of course let's not forget the countless forums that still exist today even in some cases. Digg still runs; but it's... not the same anymore. And so your question is quite apt, because the reason why I joined up with Reddit long ago; was because it had everything I wanted from both Twitter and Digg. Sort of. It's closer today than it used to be, but even if the UI is better or anything like that; it doesn't matter if the users are toxic.

And thus I wish to bring my own question into this fray for OP as well.

3. What's to keep your community from devolving into the same toxicity of any other community thus far? It may be sort of a same question different pile; but I think this particular matter needs its own special consideration.

To put it simply. What's to keep your community from becoming the next political soap box? What's keeping it to discussion only in such matters, and not full on agitprop via internet communities?

P.S. "Mods/Admins" as an answer doesn't count, since I think we can all agree that they can be biased.

[holler]

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.

[drBonkers]

What does USP abbreviate?

[presentation]

This lacks part of what makes Twitter and Reddit usable - the context of a conversation is clear. Here, you just see the latest comments on a thread, but you have to scroll way up to see the conversation up to that point.

In Reddit everything is threaded. In Twitter you respond to specific Tweets. Here, you just have an unorganized list of every comment. So as a casual, I don't feel compelled to participate in conversations that have already started, which is most of them, so I lose interest in engaging with this.

[holler]

That's good feedback and thanks for sharing.

The primary driver in building this was first to create a way to easily hop into a live conversation around a topic with anyone.

This has been a bootstrapped one-person project so far and it also comes down to how much I can handle building at a time, and what to prioritize to walk the fine line from 0 -> 1.

I def agree and plan to add ways to add context to conversations and make it easier to navigate through the history of ones already in progress.

[nvarsj]

I feel the same way. Not to say this is a bad idea, chat / IRC / etc. are all massively successful and when I was younger I loved hanging out on chat.

The problem for me is chat is synchronous. You have to sit there staring at it to participate in conversations. As a result, since I now have kids/job/etc. I basically can't participate in communities which are primarily chat based (like Discord, IRC, and so on).

The only communities I still participate in actively are those on reddit, precisely because I can engage at my leisure rather than having to respond in near real time. I feel it's the closest we have to mailing lists and forums of old.

[jack_pp]

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

[sonicggg]

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.

[holler]

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?

[formerkrogemp]

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.

[brightball]

I like the approach! Since this is HN would you be willing to talk about the tech stack at all?

[holler]

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.

[fernly]

Just FYI, when in the welcome email I click the suggested link https://sqwok.im/help/faq , Ublock Origin rears up and says,

uBlock Origin has prevented the following page from loading:

https://8j3zhg4q.r.us-east-1.awstrack.me/L0/https:%2F%2Fsqwo...

Because of the following filter:

||awstrack.me^

[holler]

Interesting!

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

[cxr]

> User profiles including bio, location, photo avatar, and chronological post listings

Please (and this goes to anyone trying to do similar work in the "social" space[1]): make sure that users have the ability to turn off post indexing if they desire (at least for people they haven't approved to "follow" them). The ability to pore over and leer at every other comment that any given person has made that day (let alone for the last N years) is _not_ something you are given in any ordinary "kitchen-table discussion". It's also not how old-style communication used to work on the Internet (e.g. mailing lists, before everything turned into the show business[2] of self-promotion). For some reason, though, "social" has come to be synonymous with the design trope of here's everything I've said, ordered reverse chronologically for pretty much anyone's perusal, regardless of their relationship with me. I'm convinced that this shift to actor-based indexing rather than the original concern for topic-based indexing has contributed greatly to the toxicity of online discussion.

1. this includes anyone doing anything in the "social coding" space

2. https://alexdanco.com/2020/10/08/making-is-show-business-now...

[jerojero]

This is very nice, it reminds me a bit of aether.app which I think has been abandoned (though it's open source so anyone could fork it).

I think it would be very valuable if you could create subthreads on each thread. Right now you have a huge blank space besides the chat which just doesn't make much sense.

I love the design of the app, feels old school but very nice. It's also very fast. I couldn't find the source code though, is it a proprietary platform? I know it's not decentralised so that's a bit disappointing. But looks good!

[holler]

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!

[joseph]

It's obnoxious to show who is typing. Like, give me a minute to compose my thoughts and type a response without feeling in a rush because everyone can see I am typing.

[holler]

Thanks for the feedback. Would it be good enough if you could turn that off? Hadn't heard this feedback before but it's fair.

[xigoi]

IMO, you took the only good thing about Reddit — being able to have multiple independent conversations on the same topic while clearly seeing the context — and removed it.

[holler]

It's a different experience for sure, and there will always be a place for threaded comments.

But this is about real time conversation, and I agree there's much to be done to improve it!

[Supermancho]

Having a localstorage list of what topics I've visited most recently, that could appear somewhere is something that reddit is poor at.

[holler]

great idea, you wouldnt want that shared between device?

[pmontra]

Firefox Android here: the page loads with the top and bottom bar and the grayed out placeholder page. Then nothing happens. The FAQ link works but the accordion (?) doesn't open.

Hints:

1. Maybe it breaks because there is more JavaScript than there should be and it makes the site brittle across browsers.

2. Both top and bottom sticky bars. I routinely use uBlock Origin to hide them on all the sites that use one of them. Both is rare but it won't be the first time. Rationale: I never subscribe to those sites and I get there either by search results or by HN posts so I'm not interested in their menus.

[holler]

Hey sorry about that! I haven't tested it in firefox on android but I'm writing it down and hope to address it soon.

[MarcelOlsz]

Please pay a designer. Pretty please.

[pndy]

Sqwok could use some breadcrumb navigation but its minimalistic style feels fine enough.

Not every site has to be done in "modern" style with card UI, big touch-friendly buttons and Corporate Memphis graphics.

[holler]

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

[LightHugger]

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

[holler]

Yes, it should be indexed although I haven't actually confirmed it works yet! I guess I probably should.

[12907835202]

Hey I worked on making my discord traffic available as a public forum a few years ago. I wound up deleting it because the MySQL was getting huge and the daily traffic was in the double figures.

I remember my biggest problems were making the comments appear pretty, with embedded images and emojis (I think I had to rehost graphics).

I'd love to help beta test a discord version if you're looking for testers.

[holler]

Hey there, thanks for sharing, what do you mean by discord version?

[DoItToMe81]

I love this! It's such a novel concept. I hope that in the future the source code will be released.

[holler]

Thanks!

[princeali_]

Pretty interesting platform. Really digging it so far. It would nice to have a button that scrolls to the top of each thread though. I found myself scrolling and scrolling and scrolling until I got to the top.

[holler]

Thank you! Appreciate the comments and feedback, that's a high priority item I plan to add soon!

[gverrilla]

Honest feedback, not from someone who has stopped to analyze your website with proper care, but instead from a tired guy after a long day, with very limited patience and only 5 seconds. Don't take it badly, because most online behavior goes very similar to this, and I hope it's valuable feedback somehow!

1: "talk, ponder,free your mind" is a very bad slogan. it's telling me what to do, instead of suggesting it, and also the last bit is absolute nonsense in this context - I hope it's a placeholder

2: this looks a lot like reddit. get out of here fast

3: come on, at least try to read the titles of these "threads" to see if there's anything interesting

4: nothing interesting, nothing unique, there's science stuff here but that's probably derived from HN traffic

5: quit

[holler]

Fair enough! The slogan is def not concrete, just something I pulled out a hat one late night so to speak...

It's fundamentally a place for open live discussion and may not be appealing as much for casual reading (yet).

The core focus so far has been building a solid chat foundation but planning to enhance other aspects of the site soon.

The content of the site is set by the people there, and since it's essentially starting from zero that means there isn't a large base of content yet, nor even a way to filter yet.

What sort of topics/content are you looking for?