I launched Soapbox with the intention of creating a more casual and spontaneous social audio app, that contains interactive features for a more fun experience. I figured keeping the app uncluttered and collecting minimal data, users would be more spontaneous with the app and use it however makes them the happiest. The difference between Soapbox and other social audio apps are sixteen-person room sizes, no social hierarchy in rooms (all users can mute/unmute by default), and our interactive features. Anyone in a room can drop a link which will create a preview for everyone to see or react to the conversation with emojis, and admins can add in a game, poll, or other interactive components directly into rooms.
Soapbox is mainly written in Go and uses WebRTC for streaming audio, we currently do not use 3rd party services other than a TURN server hosted by Twilio for our users behind a firewall. The go WebRTC server is based on some of the amazing work done by the Pion crew. We recently launched Soapbox Minis and built an open-source SDK (https://github.com/SoapboxSocial/minis.js) so developers can build Minis that interact with live Soapbox rooms, this is still very early and actively in development.
I'm not sure what can be done regarding e2e encryption when we're talking about WebRTC and TURN, but I would love to hear your take on this.
There are just so much surveillance related regulations that I can't believe that's possible. I have first hand experience when I worked in the Telecom industry. Regulators do not ignore any platform with substantial traffic.
Other than that it works pretty great.
You had your own ring so you would know when the phone was for you, but it would always ring. For example your ring could be two short and two long.
Man the chat line was crap it was like a voicemail on loop and super slow to keep you on the call for ages.
Much better was the tango doll which I also got via that phone but only 1 of the 3 came!