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Relay — An extension that adds Discord-style chat to every website
Relay is a browser extension that adds anonymous, live chat to every website, so you can chat with everyone else on the same site. Relay eliminates the gap between browsing the Internet and talking about it.
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I love this! As someone said in the chat, this could be insane for quick community help. Think Stackoverflow but live chat.
Just started the channel on my own website https://urbanhunt.co ... Free trails for anyone who cats on there 🎉
Hi Andro, thanks for your question! Here are just a few of our plans in ascending order of excitement:
* better search (e.g., you could search some Python documentation to see if anyone has asked the same question);
* auto-generating FAQs for a given site (goes hand-in-hand with search);
* opening our API and building a platform for bot developers;
* making Relay available as a script tag, so all visitors of a given website can join the chat (not just users who have downloaded the extension).
Hope you’re as pumped about these features as we are!
@sam_winter I came here to suggest the ability to implement as a script, good to know it's already something that's on your minds!
@sam_winter Having it "installed" on my website would be really cool! I see as a community-driven Interconn and that is awesome :) very promising.
Also, to make it better for support teams, it would be nice to have a Browser PUSH Notification when new questions arrives.
@douglasschmidt that's a great idea! I think browser push notifications are really underrated. I'll add it to our Trello :).
Extremely impressive, guys. I remember an idea sorta like this crossing my mind last year and my brain instantly melting out my ears as I thought about how to pull it off. This is so cool and so well done.
@greggblanchard Thank you so much! That means a lot. I think the only reason we've been able to get this far is because we didn't realize how hard it would be at the outset 😅.
This is awesome. Kinda reminds me of The Nethernet (http://pmog.com/) game. Curious to see where this goes!
@avongenesis thank you! I didn't even know about that game. It looks super cool. Going to do some more research on it to see if there are any lessons to be gleaned.
This is incredible - so many use cases! Can’t wait to see how it grows. What’s your plan to monetize?
@bennycondon thank you! Same here. We can monetize in at least a couple of different ways. We can sell digital goods to end users, and to website owners, we can sell tools for lead generation, engagement, support, etc. There are still a lot of specifics to be determined, but that's what we're thinking so far.
This is one of the geniusest (does the word exist?) things i've ever seen. Kudos. I really hope you can make it super viral.
Thank you! We'll do our best. It certainly helps to have such enthusiastic users :)
@jay_mc thank you! I totally agree. We plan to make Relay available as a script tag in the nearish future, so all visitors of a site can chat on that site.
@ariel_jedrzejczak That's one of our hopes. We want Relay to always be like a handy companion ready to help or distract.
I think about building something like this multiple times a month. Glad to see someone finally did
@masonwright40 thank you! We're working on that right now. You can sign up to get notified when we launch here: https://relaychat.app/coming-soon
Cool idea! I think there will need to be a way to focus conversation. Otherwise it will just be a lot of "hi", "hello", "what's up". Unlike a live event or live stream, there isn't a single thing everyone is watching and can comment on
Also, the bottom right placement goes over a lot of the site chat icons (intercom, drift, etc)
@robmoore That's a great point. Hopefully the "hi"s start to die down after launch day. We'll also break the conversation by path etc. (e.g., subreddit-specific chat) on a case-by-case basis as we grow. As far as the placement, you can drag the button around. You can also toggle Relay's visibility by clicking its icon in the browser menu.
@edisonjoao6871 Thanks! Super down to nerd out about the underlying tech. The backend is an Elixir API (Phoenix), which we love for its concurrency and fault-tolerance. The app itself is a React app embedded in an iframe. We did a lot of front-end optimizations to make the extension itself as light as possible given it has to run buttery-smooth on top of every webpage.
Very forward thinking project. Love the direction they are taking. The future of the internet is going to be agnostic overlays over everything from websites, games, apps, VR/AR, and other devices. Can't wait to see more of this type of development.
Pros:
- It gives the internet back to people to some degree in a nostalgic manner. It allows you to use websites, communicate, and connect like you could in the early days, on your terms without platform capture and communication monopolization/balkinization.
- Smooth UI, easy to use, light weight.
Cons:
- It is going to get difficult to self moderate as it scales and will likely need to fall back on some sort of private rooms. This could have some strange unintended side effects where influential groups of people dominate the conversation on a single website in the public channels.
- A lot of difficult UI/UX trade-offs will have to be made eventually
- Platforms like this tend to get persecuted when certain ideological groups move in. Will be fascinating to see the direction this takes to ensure it stays open and flexible.
Overall, the cons are longer term and general open platform concerns more than anything. These issues could be solved the same way similar problems were solved on IRC. Though this may sacrifice it's simplicity and elegance at some level. Not much to do there. Scaling is scaling and I see this platform going far. So this is a good problem to have. Cheers! Loving it so far 😎
Hey Brady,
Thank you so much for your comment! It really means a lot, especially coming from one of our long-time users! I hope you’re right about the development/trend of agnostic overlays.
I totally agree with you about the perils of ideological domination. It’ll be difficult to moderate conversations across the whole Internet and maintain a culture that’s open and inclusive, but we have some strategies/lead bullets that should help.
I’m looking forward to seeing how the product develops as it’s informed by user feedback. Excited to continue chatting with you as Relay scales :)
Have been following this project for around a year now. Really impressed with the project and how intuitive it is to use.
@yogert96 Thanks for being there from the start! We'll do our best to keep things simple even as we scale.
Morgan