Show HN: Virus Cafe – Make a friend in 2 minutes
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Re: Show HN: Virus Cafe – Make a friend in 2 minutes
#2Hey folks! I built Virus Cafe to help you make a friend in 2 minutes! My goal is to help people stuck indoors because of COVID-19 (or police curfews) to make meaningful connections with strangers.
Here's how it works:
1. You are matched with a random partner for a video chat
2. You're given a deep question to discuss. You have 2 minutes!
3. The only rule is: no small talk!
Small talk is the worst and I'm on a mission to eradicate it. I've expertly crafted over 200 questions designed to stimulate good conversation and skip past the boring introductions.
Here are a few samples:
- When in your life have you been the happiest?
- What would you be willing to die for?
- What is the biggest lie you’ve told without getting caught?
- What is a belief you had as a child that you no longer have?
- What human emotion do you fear the most?
- If a family member murdered someone, would you report them to the police?
- What absolutely excites you right now?
I hope you use Virus Cafe to meet a new friend and make a deep connection today.
Feross
Re: Show HN: Virus Cafe – Make a friend in 2 minutes
#3Gives out pretty negative feelings to me.
A sad emojii with a face mask is pretty depressing, and even worse if you see the mask as political.
Black lives matter is destroying cities across the USA.
I'm sure it's just me, but I wonder if anyone else sees this?
Re: Show HN: Virus Cafe – Make a friend in 2 minutes
#4Gives out pretty negative feelings to me. A sad emojii with a face mask is pretty depressing, and even worse if you see the mask as political. Black lives matter is destroying cities across the USA. I'm sure it's just me, but I wonder if anyone else sees this?
Sorry that you don't like it. Can't please everyone. Lots of people have told me they've had fun meeting new people from around the world.
Regarding the hashtag, I put it there because I'm against police brutality and I'm horrified by what the police are doing. Looters should be arrested and prosecuted, for sure. But police have a monopoly on the use of violence and must be held to a higher standard.
Re: Show HN: Virus Cafe – Make a friend in 2 minutes
#5Gives out pretty negative feelings to me. A sad emojii with a face mask is pretty depressing, and even worse if you see the mask as political. Black lives matter is destroying cities across the USA. I'm sure it's just me, but I wonder if anyone else sees this?
> Black lives matter is destroying cities across the USA.
I don't think anyone has a good solution to that. Many people have been very angry for years and they feel the need to express that. It doesn't really matter if the owners of shops are white or black at this point. If you try to block this anger, the result will be even more anger. So I think the policemen who kneel, hug, kiss the shoes etc. are doing the right thing - trying to minimize losses. And it's hard to stop because there is no good leader like MLK who can positively channel the emotions and actually present some feasible proposal that could be implemented.
Re: Show HN: Virus Cafe – Make a friend in 2 minutes
#6As this is HN, could you elaborate on the technologies you used to build this platform?
Re: Show HN: Virus Cafe – Make a friend in 2 minutes
#7The "click the emojis" doesn't increase in difficulty ;)
Are the 200 questions publicly visible somehwere?
Re: Show HN: Virus Cafe – Make a friend in 2 minutes
#8Is there a chance for chat instead of video call? I like the idea but I'm not exposing myself in video. I know it "ruins" the experience but each one to its own.
Re: Show HN: Virus Cafe – Make a friend in 2 minutes
#9As this is HN, could you elaborate on the technologies you used to build this platform?
Sure thing.
The video and voice chat is powered by WebRTC. The getUserMedia API allows a browser to access the webcam and microphone of the device. I used my own simple-peer (https://github.com/feross/simple-peer) library to make WebRTC a bit easier to work with.
The server is Node.js. I'm using Next.js for the first time on this project. I usually use a custom Express server for my projects. I'm a fan of several of Next.js's decisions -- it feels really nice to use, if a bit limiting sometimes.
I use the 'ws' package (https://github.com/websockets/ws) to implement a WebSocket server which is used to help the peers get connected over WebRTC. Once peers are connected, all video and video is transferred directly in a peer-to-peer fashion.
Except sometimes the connection can't be established, so to improve reliability of WebRTC you need to set up a TURN relay server for those situations. I used coturn (https://github.com/coturn/coturn) for that.
Lastly, I used Chakra UI (https://chakra-ui.com/) as my React component library.
Really happy with how the easy the app has been to build.
The most difficult part was getting it to work on Safari for iOS. I spent about 50% of the effort working around various bugs in the Safari media stack. https://twitter.com/feross/status/1263544033135038464
Hope this was informative!
Re: Show HN: Virus Cafe – Make a friend in 2 minutes
#10Is there a chance for chat instead of video call? I like the idea but I'm not exposing myself in video. I know it "ruins" the experience but each one to its own.
I understand how you feel but I don't think anything can replace looking into another human's eyes.