server VS jam

Amazing work! The WebRTC community needs something like this so bad. Not only will this push a bunch of users toward self-hosted/free software but will also inspire others to build cool things :)

If/when you hit scaling challenges I would love to help! I maintain github.com/pion/turn and github.com/pion/webrtc. You can see that with how screego[0] does it.

Happy to help however I can (even if not using Pion!) One of the reasons I built it was so that I could put my TURN and Signaling server in the same process. It makes it way easier to tie your auth together for signaling+TURN. Then if you do go down the SFU route lots of interesting things you could do.

[0] https://github.com/screego/server/blob/e845b3d29c4b5794ed10f...

Not exactly the same, but if you want a audio-only Clubhouse clone, check Jam https://gitlab.com/jam-systems/jam

The main repo is over at Gitlab: https://gitlab.com/jam-systems/jam/ which also has the issue tracker (we could do a better job keeping that up to date though tbh).

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

most Docker-compose.yml files I come across, e.g. https://gitlab.com/jam-systems/jam/-/blob/master/deployment/docker-compose.yml or https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/support/docker/production/docker-compose.yml propose the complete setup while some propose those and a slimmer version without a web servers or reverse proxy https://github.com/nextcloud/docker#base-version---fpm

For Jam (open source Clubhouse) we do a weekly “Jam Jam” which basically is an audio space that people can join (no video, no calendar slot negotiation, connecting with others who use the project).

We link to it in our readme

https://gitlab.com/jam-systems/jam

(can be improved)

I wonder if there is a better name for the concept that works for international audiences and people who don’t know the concept from academia.

For larger projects I can also imagine other formats like “show and tell” or “Q & A” where people submit questions (maybe even with donations or paid to create an income stream for the people working on the project)

Nice to see alternative clients already. Might also be cool to combine with Jam.

https://jam.systems/

https://gitlab.com/jam-systems/jam

[Code] https://gitlab.com/jam-systems/jam

btw 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 it switches randomly 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:

https://gitlab.com/jam-systems/jam/-/issues/19

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.

Jam should run in any modern browser 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 it 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.