It's a new public, open, and simple discussion site that mixes real-time messaging with topical conversation.
On sqwok, every post has a built-in chat room instead of traditional comments. We feel that this leads to a different dynamic when having conversations around topics, and is much more intimate.
I started building Sqwok to scratch my own itch after a period where I was reading a lot of news online, and working in the news industry. I couldn't find many places to have open, public, realtime discussions about what was going on in the world. The best web-based chat sites right now were built to target gamers, the gaming community, streaming, enterprise, or solely as private messaging apps.
Sqwok is built for a general audience who want to have ephemeral, long-lived, and engaging conversations with others across the internet, with low friction and ease of use.
All features developed for sqwok will only be to enhance the conversations.
The model seems like it's a bit more digestible / open for reading than Twitter's infamous threading model. Might be some promise here, though I have difficulty seeing the chat model scale well to many users. Is this intended to be self-hosted, or centralized?
Hey how's it going? Thank you for checking it out.
> The model seems like it's a bit more digestible / open for reading than Twitter's infamous threading model.
Yes I agree! Twitter wasn't designed for realtime conversation, it was designed over 10 years ago when pagers were a thing. The idea is to take a slight twist on that model and build a new site that focuses on open conversation in a familiar but slightly new way.
> I have difficulty seeing the chat model scale well to many users.
I agree here too, and have some ideas for features that will help scale the conversations, such as chat modes, and side-channel ideas etc. For now it's "mvp" and I'm just focused on making it work with smaller groups of people. Certainly is a problem that will occur down the line though!
Right now this is centralized, it's just me building it so I'm trying to get the "mvp" out and test the idea. There are lots of potential ideas for how it can play out in the future.
Let me know if you have any other questions, I appreciate your feedback, feel free to mention me on there @guac, cheers.
3 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 13.7 ms ] threadI'm building sqwok.im.
It's a new public, open, and simple discussion site that mixes real-time messaging with topical conversation.
On sqwok, every post has a built-in chat room instead of traditional comments. We feel that this leads to a different dynamic when having conversations around topics, and is much more intimate.
I started building Sqwok to scratch my own itch after a period where I was reading a lot of news online, and working in the news industry. I couldn't find many places to have open, public, realtime discussions about what was going on in the world. The best web-based chat sites right now were built to target gamers, the gaming community, streaming, enterprise, or solely as private messaging apps.
Sqwok is built for a general audience who want to have ephemeral, long-lived, and engaging conversations with others across the internet, with low friction and ease of use.
All features developed for sqwok will only be to enhance the conversations.
Feel free to ask me any questions, thank you.
> The model seems like it's a bit more digestible / open for reading than Twitter's infamous threading model.
Yes I agree! Twitter wasn't designed for realtime conversation, it was designed over 10 years ago when pagers were a thing. The idea is to take a slight twist on that model and build a new site that focuses on open conversation in a familiar but slightly new way.
> I have difficulty seeing the chat model scale well to many users.
I agree here too, and have some ideas for features that will help scale the conversations, such as chat modes, and side-channel ideas etc. For now it's "mvp" and I'm just focused on making it work with smaller groups of people. Certainly is a problem that will occur down the line though!
Right now this is centralized, it's just me building it so I'm trying to get the "mvp" out and test the idea. There are lots of potential ideas for how it can play out in the future.
Let me know if you have any other questions, I appreciate your feedback, feel free to mention me on there @guac, cheers.