roundtable.audio is an open-source web app which enables real-time audio discussions. Users can generate public or private ad-hoc "roundtables", or create them via other sources on the internet (currently supports Twitter and Hacker News).
roundtable.audio (formerly discourse.fm) has been a side project of mine for almost a year now. I was originally interested in building it as a way for people to have conversations with strangers who shared a common interest in some particular topic. I had a particularly vocal roommate who commonly had a 2-hour each-way commute to work, and thought it would be neat if people like him could effectively jump into a podcast.
About halfway through building the MVP, I heard of a fast-growing project called Clubhouse (ever heard of it?). Despite feeling like I was somewhat late to the party, I kept building, mostly for the challenge and learning opportunity.
After launching last December, I built two extensions on top of it. The first is a Twitter bot which allows users to automatically generate roundtables from any Tweet thread by mentioning @RoundtableBot and including the words "start a roundtable". The second one is hackernews.roundtable.audio, which pulls stories live from HN and allows users to drop into audio discussions (rather than comment threads) about HN posts.
The code is now open-source at https://github.com/sethkimmel3/r.... Ultimately, I think it'd be neat to have the ability to augment any relatively synchronous, text-based content on the web (think news articles, comment sections, forums, etc.) with live-audio discussions. I'd love to see community contributions to the repo which get at this goal.
Thanks for checking it out and reading this long-winded comment!
Mantis
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