Show HN: Jam, an Open Source Clubhouse (w/ WebRTC)
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Re: Show HN: Jam, an Open Source Clubhouse (w/ WebRTC)
#2Hi everyone,
a few days ago @DoubleMalt, @mitschabaude and me did a one-day hackathon to see if we can get a minimal WebRTC based version of a Clubhouse-style "room" to work.
Since then we added a TURN server, bug fixes ("can you hear me?") and a bit of ui polishing. It is still early (please don't be too harsh) but you should find Jam to be quite usable as it is right now.
Jam runs in any modern browser, at least the ones we could get our hands on. But the long-tail of browsers and operating systems is … long, so please let us know if it does not work for you, and what you are using. We want Jam to run if it can run. If your toaster supports WebRTC it might run Jam as well.
We tried to keep the implementation fairly minimal, I'm sure there is more we can remove and simplify once we spend more time on it.
https://gitlab.com/jam-systems/jam
Please give Jam a try and let us know what you think. Any thoughts, comments, feature requests, hosting-deploy-target requests etc etc highly appreciated.
(for those who are not familiar with Clubhouse yet:)
A room in Clubhouse (or on Twitter Spaces) is a bit like Zoom without video, without screen sharing and without text messaging.
You see a grid of all the people in the room, who is speaking, who would like to say something (slow mute/unmute flashing), who is clapping (fast mute/unmute flashing) and that's it.
Over the past few years I experienced what we all now call "Zoom fatigue". I just don't enjoy video calls. When the pandemic started it felt like even people who in the past were happy with phone calls also wanted to jump on Zoom calls. I'm glad that eventually slowed down again.
I'm super excited about Clubhouse, Twitter Spaces and the activity around audio spaces and live calls.
In hindsight it is fascinating how the ui for group phone calls on smartphones has not advanced much compared to the non-smart phones for such a long time.
Re: Show HN: Jam, an Open Source Clubhouse (w/ WebRTC)
#3I don't have access to Clubhouse but don't you lose an additional ton of valuable information when there is no video? Like non-physical (video) communication already has its challenges but this takes them to another level. Or am I missing something here?
Re: Show HN: Jam, an Open Source Clubhouse (w/ WebRTC)
#4I don't have access to Clubhouse but don't you lose an additional ton of valuable information when there is no video? Like non-physical (video) communication already has its challenges but this takes them to another level. Or am I missing something here?
I prefer audio only, it removes the stress of how you look, and you can do something else while talking (without feeling watched).
Re: Show HN: Jam, an Open Source Clubhouse (w/ WebRTC)
#5btw one thing we could not solve so far:
it seems like on iOS Safari there is _no way_ to tell whether sound output happens via the loudspeaker or the earspeaker (super annoying when you have the phone at your ear and the audio stream re-connects and then randomly switches output to the loudspeaker — which is really loud), there might be a way to work around this without introducing a native app but so far we did not find one:
Re: Show HN: Jam, an Open Source Clubhouse (w/ WebRTC)
#6Love this! Please make landing screen a teeny bit prettier and you could definitely start recommending this to regular 'retail' folk. I'd consider putting the about text below the main 'create room' panel for example
It looks like a nerd app, just needs a tiny bit of swish to make it a mom and pop app too
Re: Show HN: Jam, an Open Source Clubhouse (w/ WebRTC)
#7Nice work.
What type of backend do you need in terms of servers/users if this was a real product? Clubhouse has been suffering under heavy load in certain cases. WebRTC is mostly P2P, but there is still a significant server load to handle edge cases and large rooms.
You should show this off to Mozilla or some other web company that's backing WebRTC and try to get some funds for scaling up your servers if you need to in the future.
Re: Show HN: Jam, an Open Source Clubhouse (w/ WebRTC)
#8Love this! Please make landing screen a teeny bit prettier and you could definitely start recommending this to regular 'retail' folk. I'd consider putting the about text below the main 'create room' panel for example It looks like a nerd app, just needs a tiny bit of swish to make it a mom and pop app too
Thank you, now that basic calls are working we will definitely put more effort in the look and feel.
We also plan to allow some basic customization like adding a logo and selecting 1-2 colors so you can make the Jam better fit the identity of your community (a bit like on reddit).
Appreciate the suggestion of switching the "about" and "create room" segments, great idea!
Re: Show HN: Jam, an Open Source Clubhouse (w/ WebRTC)
#9Nice work. What type of backend do you need in terms of servers/users if this was a real product? Clubhouse has been suffering under heavy load in certain cases. WebRTC is mostly P2P, but there is still a significant server load to handle edge cases and large rooms. You should show this off to Mozilla or some other web company that's backing WebRTC and try to get some funds for scaling up your servers if you need to…
Spot on. For larger rooms we will probably have to add mixing on the server side and that will definitely put more load on the server.
We also want to make it super simple to spin up your own Jam for example if you are organizing a micro conference over a weekend and for that we will need to better understand what that means so we can recommend what kind of server/specs to go for.
Thanks a lot for bringing this question up. We need a good answer.
We are currently reaching out to friends and strangers who have a bit more experience running high demand WebRTC + mixing setups to learn about the scaling challenges.
That said, we are quite surprised how well p2p WebRTC works for audio-only in smaller rooms if most participants have a decent internet connection.
WebRTC + Opus is magic.
Re: Show HN: Jam, an Open Source Clubhouse (w/ WebRTC)
#10I don't have access to Clubhouse but don't you lose an additional ton of valuable information when there is no video? Like non-physical (video) communication already has its challenges but this takes them to another level. Or am I missing something here?
It’s like podcasting vs YouTube. Audio-only can be better under certain contexts