jam VS Zulip

Jam pro

Jam – Self-Hosted Clubhouse\ (40 comments)

Wow, I just woke up to this. Glad to see Jam here on hn. We've come a long way since the initial release earlier this year (Show HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26131123).

Most of our efforts since february went into making the rooms more reliable which sounds simple but there are actually countless of different reasons for why audio might not work or not work as well as it could (switching from wifi to mobile data, microphone permissions, bandwidth problems, OS forces app into background, …) some are solvable others at least need to be documented and tracked.

What else is new other than reliability?:

# Support for large rooms (think: thousands of people in the audience) using an SFU

Initially Jam only had support for p2p rooms which is great for small rooms (up to like ~20 people depending on upstream bandwidth of the speakers) but for online conferences, meetups and so on you often need rooms that support 100s or 1000s of participants so we added an SFU where the speakers still send audio to each other p2p to keep conversations low-latency but we use a server to stream audio to all users that are in the audience.

(That said: you can still run Jam p2p-only if you prefer that)

# Locally recorded multi-track audio (think: podcasts with multiple guests, where you get one high quality audio track per speaker)

You can try multi-track audio recordings on our public beta server (https://beta.jam.systems). Tap on our own user and then "Start Podcast Recording". When you tap on your own user again and then "Stop Podcast Recording" the browser will prompt you with downloads for all audio tracks (we will make this more smooth going forward).

# Custom UI

For everyone who wants to add audio rooms to their own app but needs full control over the look and feel we have added an API and JavaScript library (and NPM package) so you can "build your own" ui for Jam. This basically means that Jam is running "headless" as an audio room server and makes sure audio works while you can build exactly the ui that you want.

E.g. let's say you have an app like Google Docs and you want to allow people to talk about a document. In this case you might want something that doesn't look like a room on Clubhouse or Twitter Spaces but rather like a line of avatars and with the API and library you can build this yourself now:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/jam-core

https://gitlab.com/jam-systems/jam/-/tree/master/ui/examples

# Managed hosting

For everyone who wants to use Jam but doesn't want to install and maintain Jam themselves we are run and support Jam for you (think: what Wordpress.com is to Wordpress.org):

https://jamshelf.com

I am working on an open source tool (Jam) that can be used to record podcasts with guests.

Zulip — Real-time chat with a unique email-like threading model. The free plan includes 10,000 messages of search history and File storage up to 5 GB. also, it provides a self-hostable open-source version.

(1) Zulip Chat - https://zulip.com/ - seems to be reasonably popular, but more people should know about it

I’ve been using it for over 5 years now [1], and it’s as good as ever. It’s way faster than any other chat app I’ve used. It has a good UI and conversation model. It has a simple and functional API that lets me curl threads and write blog posts based on them.

(only problem is that I Ctrl-+ in my browser to make the font bigger – I think it’s too dense for most people)

(2) re2c regex to state machine compiler - https://re2c.org

A gem from the 90’s, which people have done a great job maintaining and improving (getting Go and Rust target support in the last few years). I started using it in 2016, and used for a new program a few months ago. I came to the conclusion that it should have been built into C, because C has shitty string processing – and Ken Thompson both invented C AND brought regular languages to computing !!

In comparison, treesitter lexers are very low level, fiddly, and error prone. I recently saw dozens of ad hoc fixes to the tree-sitter-bash lexer, which is unsurprising if you look at the structure of the code (manually crawling through backslashes and braces in C).

https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-bash/blob/master/...

These fixes are definitely appreciated, but I think it indicates a problem with the model itself.

(based on https://lobste.rs/s/endspx/software_you_are_thankful_for#c_y...)

[1] https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2018/04/26.html

A few more truly in the vibe of open source projects not advertising their hosting providers: https://plane.so/ , https://element.io/ , https://www.loomio.com/ , https://zulip.com/ , and it keeps going... Very few open source projects, in the FOSS sense, are advertising their hosting provider.

I was so excited to see this happen!

I'm not a customer of yours, but your blog posts inspired me a lot. Your journey through quitting caffeine is a great and heartening read.

I've got two things to say;

1) Will you consider source-availabling the web portal (app.keygen.sh) too? Some enterprises could use it for easy management/support for custoner's licenses. Although now that I think about it, it could also discourage custom, more suitable implementations for each use-case... I'm torn on this one. I would like to see it available on GitHub too just out of curiosity too. It's very beautiful.

2) For a team + customers' chat, I cannot recommend Zulip enough. It's a joy to use and has the most innovative chat system I've ever seen. https://zulip.com

I hope your business keeps prospering!

Zulip | Senior Flutter Engineer | REMOTE or San Francisco | Full-time | https://zulip.com/

At Zulip, we’re out to build the world’s best collaboration platform, and we’re committed to keeping it 100% open source. Zulip is the only modern team chat app that is designed for both live and asynchronous conversations. Our product serves as the communication hub for businesses, open-source projects, educators and communities around the world.

We're building the next generation of Zulip's mobile apps in Flutter. We're looking for a senior engineer with Flutter experience to join our small core team and help define the future of team chat. Our Flutter prototype is just a few months old, so this is a greenfield opportunity to help shape the app's architecture from early on.

For full details, check out https://zulip.com/jobs/. Apply at [email protected].

Anyways, I'm an internet stranger, not a social media expert. So let me know what you all think. And if we make a discord or zulip or something to make this a reality, let me know and I'd love to help any way I can.