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.