Show HN: Alto.lol – Spontaneous video chats with college classmates
I moved to San Francisco, away from my family and friends, a few months before the start of Covid. I was still working for my job back in NYC and was the only one on my team who was fully remote. The isolation from my co-workers was challenging but video chatting with them on a regular basis helped with the transition.
After I was laid off, I began experimenting with real-time communication apps to alleviate the isolation that people felt due to working remotely and sheltering in place. I also searched for volunteer opportunities on helpwithcovid.com and worked with a project owner on ideating and planning a video chat app he wanted to build.
Around early August, I learned that a number of universities were going to be either fully remote or limit capacity on campus for the fall semester. I envisioned a video chat app where students were free to hang out and meet new classmates since it'd be difficult, if not impossible, to do so in person.
Alto (short for Alone Together) enables you to sign up with your university email, enter the lobby, and:
1) join a room where other classmates are already chatting
2) invite a classmate that is in the lobby to chat
3) create a room and send the link to your school friends to start chatting
I've worked with Python/JS for the past three years, but after being laid off, I wanted to try something new. I heard great things about Elixir back in my product management days, so I spent the last month learning a new stack (Elixir/Phoenix/LiveView/Tailwind) and building the MVP. Video chat is built using WebRTC.
I'm happy to share this project with the HN community! Thanks for reading about it and please let me know what you think in the comments below!
6 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 24.0 ms ] threadWe used Discord, how does your tool compare to that? Because in Discord you can have "rooms" as voice channels, where people can casually drop in/out and have spontaneous chats in the message channels.
I want to first help students connect with others university-wide. That way, a group of students can discover and connect with each other who otherwise might not because they don't share the same academic goals. Also, Alto is a synchronous platform so it's important that students, immediately after they sign in, can begin video chatting with someone. That's more likely to happen when it's open to the entire student population.
I plan on launching groups in the future, subject to change based on feedback, where any cohort, student org or course can have their own group. At this point, it'll be easier for any student to discover other students based on mutual personal/professional/academic interests and frictionless since everyone will already be on the platform.
What's the demographic of your cohort? Is it based on major, year or some other factor(s)? Is the Discord server you're talking about university-wide or cohort-wide?
I've only used Discord a few times so I'm unfamiliar with its features, but I think Alto has less friction when compared. Alto prioritizes video communication, makes it easy to discover any classmate in your school, and in the future, any classmate associated with any group all in the same place. Additionally, Alto allows you to directly invite another student to a video chat room and know within a few seconds whether or not that person wants to chat without messaging back and forth.
I may be completely wrong about Discord's existing capabilities so you'll have to correct me. Also, I would love to learn more about your experiences attending university remotely and using Discord. Let me know if you're free to chat!
My cohort is based on major + year (eg. Mech Engineering Class of 2022) And the Discord server is cohort wise (eg. theres different message channels for different courses, a few lounge voice channels etc.)