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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)

#61

Post by smeej »

SeasonalEnnui wrote: post #55
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.

It was interesting to me too. I'm autistic, so I'm used to communicating with people focused almost entirely on their faces, not giving or receiving many cues from the rest of their and my body language.

But it turns out most people depend on being able to read and send those nonverbal signals subconsciously with the rest of their bodies to get their points across, and not being able to do so is exhausting for them. It's easier to communicate by phone, where that limitation is expected.

I'm not sure how it can or will, but I'd love to see this Zoom fatigue motivate people who are used to having a wider array of communication methods available to them figure out how to capture that in remote comms.

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

#62

Post by ldenoue »

tosh wrote: post #17
jbaudanza wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly recommend MediaSoup for this. It’s all node based and is great for creating “rooms” from WebRTC connections.

Thanks for the pointer!

Janus is another famous SFU but they do have a plugin called AudioBridge that mixes all audio on the server https://janus.conf.meetecho.com/audiobridgetest.html

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

#63

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

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…

thanks for building this. maybe you can point me in the right direction with the naming.

Names like /club/ (house) or /jam/ sounds like they might appeal to an audiophile. apart from using a name that suggests it lends itself to collaborative online music sessions is there anything in this technology that improves on the sound quality/delivery over what the existing platforms do?

tl;dr: Music production evolves over time and digital content distribution is very different in the mixing business. Older formats are not built with streaming in mind and so you lose a lot of quality during upload to streaming services: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHxMsawJsTc

Instead of just another SaaS that claims they've invented the group-call (which we could already do over circuit-switched networks minus the data monetization & user tracking) is there any benefit for those of us who really take the "listening" part seriously?

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

#64

Post by zenosmosis »

tosh wrote: post #18
yawnxyz wrote: post #13

wow this is incredible! How many concurrent users does it support?

Thank you. That's a great question. Our current setup is p2p WebRTC and should scale to many small rooms (up to ~12 people) fairly well. That said, there is a TURN server for NAT traversal and a signal server for coordination. We'll try to get a better picture of where the limits are this week. I don't have a good answer atm to be honest.

Not an expert here but have some experience with it:

Assuming that each peer is connected to every other peer via a mesh network [see this image for reference: https://github.com/feross/simple-peer/blob/master/img/full-m...], each outgoing stream (esp. audio / video) is likely going to be duplicated, per recipient.

Scalability over a mesh network is fully dependent on CPU and network performance of all of the connected devices, and I'd doubt it could handle 12 participants if there is video involved, unless all participants are running relatively high-end and modern devices, with optimal network conditions.

You'll need a SFU or an MFU running on the server to handle larger rooms, while enabling all connected devices to only have to send one output stream per media type, regardless of how many connected participants there are.

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

#65

Post by TobySKT »

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

#66

Post by tosh »

SeasonalEnnui wrote: post #55
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.

Thank you for bringing this up!

Do you have experience with speech to text systems for live calls? Which product/service does this really well? I'm super motivated to find a way to add great speech-text and text-speech support to Jam.

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

#67

Post by mittermayr »

Works flawlessly, only wish would be to have some sort of public lobby (or many small lobbies) to try it out and listen in for a bit to get a feel for it. Great conversations don’t require hundreds of people, so I wouldn’t worry too much about supporting larger rooms just yet. It certainly would be nice however, to just browse through or tune in to random rooms (like a radio station) so I can discover interesting stuff (if meant to be public).

Love the open-source approach!

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

#68

Post by tosh »

tosh wrote: post #8
jabberwcky wrote: post #6

Love 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!

We just released a new version that has the "about" and "create room" segments flipped around :))

https://jam.systems

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

#69

Post by aristofun »

luplex wrote: post #49
thatcat wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the Ux, very simple and responsive. It would be great if users on the stage could share a file with everyone else.

This could easily run on top of matrix, which would provide all that out of the box.

Could you point to some examples/tutorials of audio chats based on matrix?
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