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Comment by imgabe | Hacker News Reader

I hate to be this guy, but why is this better than using teamspeak, ventrilo, discord, or any of the other group voice chat programs?

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For users: Jam works in the browser without having to install anything (Discord does too though) and without having to create an account. You just need the URL of a room and you can join.

Jam is open source so you can look at the code but also make changes if you want to (e.g. if you prefer different reaction emoji). While not trivial it definitely is a great option to have imho.

Last but not least we designed Jam in a way that works well stand-alone but also makes it easy to integrate in existing web and mobile apps. For example there are people who run forums/communities or saas b2b apps (e.g. productivity tools) who want to add audio rooms as a feature and with Jam they can just grab the code and add rooms using an iframe (or use the JavaScript library for more advanced integrations). Not sure if that's possible with teamspeak, ventrilo or discord?

Jam is p2p WebRTC w/ low-latency and high-quality audio (opus) so it _should_ work well for competitive gaming. If you are looking for an audio chat tool designed for gaming the existing solutions you mentioned might be a better fit but happy to learn more about how we could make Jam better there as well.

What do I do if a troll joins the room and starts playing Rick Astley non-stop?

You join in the audience (others only can hear you if you are on stage), moderators can move trolls back to the audience. Simple but works quite well.

Glad to see this mentioned.

I'd like to try a server with it and test a bit, but wonder if I self hosted, could I tell the software to use a TURN server only and block the p2p?

( For my use cases I need to prevent people from getting easy access to other people's ip addys )

You can't self-host them. They're not even options. It's like saying "why is your car better than Amtrak." Maybe it's not better -- it's certainly worth less money -- but you're not shopping for a railroad. The only way to self-host Discord is to buy the entire company, valued $15B.

IIRC you can self-host Teamspeak and Ventrillo.

I have definitely done so with both of them, but it was quite a while ago, not sure if that has changed.

You can, so they're more similar to Jam as far as software. On the licensing, not so much. Teamspeak requires a recurring payment.

Unlike all the software you listed, it's open source and can be self-hosted in a way that you can be relatively confident that you're running what you intended to run?

You cannot self-host those.

Instead, how is it better than Jitsi and Mumble, given that they are already well tested and widespread?

In the beginning we actually were looking at whether we can use Jitsi for the audio part of Jam and just focus on the ui but Jitsi is huge and difficult to get into so we (arguably) naively started from scratch and then had to solve many problems that Jitsi probably already solves (?).

That said: if you are looking for something that has room concepts close to Clubhouse or Twitter Spaces (you see who is in the room, who is speaking, you can move people between audience and stage and so on) and an easy way to add those rooms to existing (web) or mobile apps then Jam is great out of the box. If you are looking for screen sharing or video then Jitsi is a better starting point right now I think.

Mumble I am not very familiar with but it looks interesting. As far as I understand it is not web based but like Jam it also is p2p and uses opus for audio (low latency, high quality)? Perhaps someone who knows Mumble can do a comparison.

Mumble isn't exactly P2P. It has a server (murmurd) that handles all the streams. I think it could work as SFU. And, actually, there is a web frontend: https://github.com/Johni0702/mumble-web

Your use of Opus and the option to run a SFU makes this a suitable replacement of Mumble for meetings, like in the Pirate Parties around the world. We are heavy users of Mumble.

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