Alternatives
Products that do what Have voice-only virtual coffees with fellow HN'ers does
I'm running several voice-only virtual coffee events on the Discord server in the URL, only for today. The rules are pretty simple: 1. Wait for the "event" to start (see times at the end) 2. If there are no tables with 1 participant, join any one. 3. If there is a table with 1 participant, join that one. 4. When the event ends, all the voice channels are deleted and you have to wait till the next event starts. I initially wanted to build my own web app but then I realised it would be so much easier to just leverage Discord's infrastructure. I also built a bot in a couple hundred lines of Go…
- 1CO
2024 · coffeehouse.chat
- 2
- 3
- 4HN
I'm Seth, creator of discourse.fm, a browser-based tool/platform to create live audio chat rooms. I just launched an extension of the site - https://hackernews.discourse.fm/ - which pulls stories in real-time from the HN site using the public API, and enables anyone to join a live audio discussion about the story (think Clubhouse rooms autogenerated for HN stories). Once you enter a room, you can grab the link generated for a room and paste it back to the comments on the HN story to invite more participants. hackernews.discourse.fm is both a full-fledged product and a…
2021
- 5
- 6
- 7IH
Hi, I have published a mobile app to have coffee chat with HN users. There was already a guy who made a website for this, but I wanted to do it in mobile to practice WebRTC(technology behind the audio chat) and have some fun. I haven't spent too much time in terms of the general functionality as a HN client but can upgrade it if there are enough users enjoying the app. You can download the apps via the links below; IOS: https://apps.apple.com/tr/app/betternews-coffee-chat/id65047... Android: As you might have known, Android requires the app to be tested in a…
2024
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12TA
Hi HN, For years I’ve missed the feeling of an always-on chatroom without the silos and social overhead of Discord. So I built Together: a single-room, no-signup group chat that you join with one click. No channels, no rules (yet), no onboarding flow. Everyone lands in the same place and can start talking in under a second. Why I made it - Forums and blog comments are great but slow; Discord/Slack feel heavy for casual drop-ins if you aren’t already a member of a community. - I wanted the simplest possible space where ~100 people could idle, share shower thoughts, and keep the…
Oct 2025 · together.lol
- 13
- 14GS
This weekend I finally shipped Gryt, a project I’ve been building since 2022 — an open-source, self-hostable Discord-style app focused on reliable voice chat + text. I’m the creator. I started it after getting fed up with Discord disconnects/paywalls and wanted something self-hosted and auditable. I started on this in 2022 and had an early proof-of-concept working back then (auth + friends list), but I quickly realized WebRTC voice isn’t something you can duct-tape together. I spent a big chunk of the next couple years learning the stack (ICE/DTLS-SRTP, NAT traversal, SFU design),…
Feb 2026 · gryt.chat
- 15
- 16TI
Hello HN, I built Teamates.io[0] - a place for professionals to have small coffee chats with a random partner right now. Think of it like a virtual coffeeshop where you can chat with strangers while you're taking a little break. It's in open beta and you can try using it right now. Please be nice and professional to each other :) I noticed over the course of pandemic I missed random coffee chats with my coworkers and random chats with strangers. I think it's important to have these unplanned conversations. I would really appreciate the feedback from you all, since I believe it's a pretty…
2021
- 17HW
Hi HN, here's something fun to play with. It takes any HN thread and turns it into an audio conversation so you can listen to the thread while doing other things. I've seen many previous attempts to turn HN threads into podcasts, but they all shared a common issue IMO: trying to reduce the very rich back-and-forth into a single-thread single-reader boring podcast. Instead, I wanted to hear the actual debate from the actual thread! So I asked Claude 3.7 to build this for me as a browser-only app. It just needs a thread URL and an Elevenlabs API key (this all remains in your browser, you can…
2025 · onetake-ai.github.io
- 18TU
This server started a few weeks ago via some HN comments. It's very unofficial! There'll probably be some negative comments about discord. I know that many people dislike discord. (Side note: I hope more founders build discord alternatives) If you're active on discord and would like a HN channel, feel free to join. The server has the same guidelines as HN: > On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. > Off-Topic:…
2023 · discord.com
- 19NP
I created a pet project to see if it is of use and interesting to people. The idea is on-demand real-time chat rooms for trending topics and for personal use. You can go to the main page at www.urshoutbox.com to create your own room then share it across your social networks/email, etc. I created a hacker news specific "shoutbox" at http://www.urshoutbox.com/bLmYAL/hacker-news . If nobody is in there, please be patient and (I hope) people will join soon to start talking. The idea is to have trending topics on facebook/twitter/etc and have chat rooms to get…
2014 · urshoutbox.com
- 20FI
This is something fun I’ve been hacking on recently: ridiculously simple group chat. Go to http://faces.io and then get your friends to do the same. That’s it! :-D Currently works best in Chrome. It’s definitely beta status at best. Audio can get weird—be ready to mute. ;-) Let me know what you think!
2014
- 21MW
I always find myself frustrated by how many steps I have to take to video chat with someone online. There's always too much software to download and install, and too many accounts to remember. The high-end, high-price Cisco conferencing systems I've used are especially fragile. So I built Vidless in a weekend for myself, and I hope you find it useful too. Just create a room and share the link, and you'll be chatting in seconds. You can invite several people (I haven't really tested a max yet), and chats on Vidless are always private. Enjoy!
2012 · vidless.com
- 22HM
Hey HN, I've been a long time HN reader and here is my first contribution. Hoodsup.me is a chat-based matchmaking app built on top of your Facebook social graph. It matchmakes you with people who are geographically close to you and with whom you share common points. You can optionally activate your webcam to talk face-to-face with your partner. Think of it as a Sonar meets a genital-free Chatroulette. I would love to get some feedback. It's only optimized for WebKit for now. No signup is required so just stop by and say hi! :) Clickable link: <a…
2011 · hoodsup.me
- 23EE
Hey everyone on HN! We recently spent the past couple of weeks building out an end-to-end platform which can plug-in multiple models (both open/closed-source) to create voice driven conversational applications. We've tried to make the process simple & concise through documentation. Feel free to try it out and provide feedback. We will be launching a dashboard in the coming week for monitoring and analytics alongwith more open source models. Let us know what you all think. (if you want to contribute, we have tons of features planned - do let us know)
2023 · github.com
- 24AD
Hi HN! I built this bot that allows you to chat with your technical documentation! It’s been pretty nifty so far on our Discord help forums, and it’s open-source so I figured I would share! Cheers.
2024
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Refine with a description →