You're probably already a member of several online group chats. It usually goes: somebody creates a group for some purpose, like a project group, an event group, or a family group, and then adds people to it. You might not know everyone in the group, or even care about the group's purpose, and leaving might make you look bad.

I spent my free time for the past few months building a service that doesn't allow you to create groups, but rather automates the process while making it less awkward. Whenever two people connnect, it automatically detects mutual friends between the two people who all know each other, and then creates a private conversation space for each group. Groups dynamically grow as mutual friends connect with one another. Rather than making it chat-style, conversations within each group are threaded to keep things organised. All you have to do is add (or remove) people you know, and Scapehouse takes care of the rest for everybody involved.

There's also a public conversation space (a "living room") for each country that people access the site from. You can only make new threads in your own country's living room, but you can reply to threads in other countries. We're starting out with just a few countries but more will be added soon.

I've released a public beta at https://scapehouse.com. The site is quite barebones at the moment, but it's fast and I made sure it works nicely on mobile as well as the desktop. To join, the only things required in the registration form are a username and password; everything else is optional and browsing living rooms doesn't require an account. Feedback is welcome!