Hello peeps! After two sleepless weekends, I am more than happy to launch my first personal side project after shutting down Mage Market, my YC W19 startup.

Things have been really tough lately and with the ongoing forced quarantine I couldn't help myself but build something I needed: a place to find new people and talk about like-minded topics.

While Zoom, FaceTime and Houseparty are great apps to meetup with friends, I have not found anything that can help meeting people you don't know yet and just casually hangout.

Introducing: 📻 EmojiTalkie

EmojiTalkie.com

• ⚡ No download or account required
• 👋 Join an EmojiChannel
• 🗣️ Tell a close friend (yeah, get that critical mass, whoop whoop)

Since the inception of ChatRoulette I found it very entertaining to just casually hop on a call with a stranger and talk about random stuff. Unfortunately, a lot of these platforms have quickly turned into 🍆🍆-parties due to their video-nature.

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🎧 Why Audio Only?

With EmojiTalkie I want to offer a similar experience, but remove potential attack vectors that video conversations with strangers might have. I am planning to add various tools to mute/ban/report malicious actors who still abuse the audio platform.

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🕒 Why now?

With the ongoing COVID-19 quarantine in most cities, a lot of places where you used to meet new people have shutdown, such as bars (/🍹), soccer clubs (/⚽), local game stores (/🎮), ...

While an audio chat can certainly not replace the in-person experience, I am hoping to provide a platform to at least chat about the topics you care about.

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🎁 Sponsored by daily.co

All of this could not have been build in two weekends without the amazing folks at @Daily.co, special thanks to @Kwindla Hultman Kramer for hooking me up with the API support.

Thank you for everyone who gives this little app a try! I'd love to hear your feedback and bug reports!

Stay safe and sane,

Peer

P.S.: I am usually in the /👋 or /🎮 channel, hit me up :)

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MVP Roadmap

• ✅ Show participants in each channel as a color
• ✅ Show loading indicator and empty screen
• ✅ Most Frequently Joined and Country Channels
• ✅ Vastly increase connection to channels
• Make URL copy & shareable
• Mute other participants
• Show your own audio level
• Safari Support
• Toggle empty/non-empty channels
• Add "Local" category to only talk to people in your GPS region
• Settings (i.e. change Microphone, level)
• NSFW channels and age restriction: 🔞👅🍆🍑🌿🚬

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Technical stuff

EmojiTalkie is written in React and uses NextJS.org, Material-ui.com, Emoji Mart and Daily.co as VOIP-infrastructure. If anyone wants to contribute, please reach out to me via email