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Show HN: Jam, an Open Source Clubhouse (w/ WebRTC)

jam.systems

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Re: Show HN: Jam, an Open Source Clubhouse (w/ WebRTC)

#51

Post by im_dario »

tosh wrote: post #9
sxp wrote: post #7

Nice 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 quest…

Nice project. For server side mixing, how hard would be to integrate Jam with Mumble? There is a Github repository that does it: https://github.com/Johni0702/mumble-web

Re: Show HN: Jam, an Open Source Clubhouse (w/ WebRTC)

#52

Post by emdowling »

arkitaip wrote: post #3

I 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?

Clubhouse has proven quite popular for traditionally underrepresented groups, and I believe it is in a large part due to being audio-only. For speakers, they can focus on what they are saying and hearing, rather than what they look like.

It also lowers the cost of entry. While smartphone cameras are quite good, the expectation for video quality has risen to the point where it is prohibitively expensive for a large portion of the population. When you factor in lighting, hardware and software for editing, bandwidth and time, it excludes a huge number of people and narrows down the diversity of content. Traditional podcasting is also suffering from a similar rise in total cost. Clubhouse eliminates most of those costs - all you need is a smartphone. Granted, it is iOS-only, but this will not be the case for much longer. We can expect Clubhouse to explode even more when it launches for Android.

For listeners, everyone is subject to unconscious bias. By being audio-only, it helps reduce a lot of the factors that would bias our opinion of someone.

It's a feature. Not a bug.

Re: Show HN: Jam, an Open Source Clubhouse (w/ WebRTC)

#54

Post by bugmen0t »

Nice work! A colleague of mine did a similar thing in 2014 but it bitrotted terribly. Code is at https://github.com/tOkeshu/bananaphone. Great to see some alternatives popping up!

He presented it at a mini conference in Berlin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyIIkUV3moM&list=PL37ZVnwpes...

Re: Show HN: Jam, an Open Source Clubhouse (w/ WebRTC)

#55

Post by SeasonalEnnui »

tosh wrote: post #2

Hi 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 th…

It was interesting to me to hear the concept of "zoom fatigue". In my world perspective as a deaf person; the rapid adoption of video calling in 2020/21 represents a huge leap forward in accessibility where I could now lip-read people and converse much more naturally.

Re: Show HN: Jam, an Open Source Clubhouse (w/ WebRTC)

#57

Post by frypto »

I was thinking about building something like this based on Jitsi. But I got 20% CPU utilisation on a 2GB/1Core Hetzner Cloud Instance with only three Test Audio Connections. Wonder what's going on. I already tried to switch off logging but it didn't help much. Do you have Data how much resources you need to host this?
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