A small server broadcasts its own WiFi. Anyone nearby can join from the browser already on their phone to chat, talk, share photos, and watch live cameras. No cell service, no internet, and no app needed. It's your box, so you decide what gets kept.
Three MacBook Pros and a Mac mini joined a Linksys EA7500 WiFi router with nothing plugged into its internet port. Everything ran on that local network alone: no gateway, no cloud, no outside connection. Macs just happened to be what was on hand: the server runs anywhere Node.js does, and any device with a web browser can join.
Real-time chat and the shared drawing canvas worked across every machine.
Camera feeds streamed between computers with no internet in the loop.
Songs from AnalogArchiveJS, shared as links in chat, played in near-perfect sync on all four computers at once.
Free apps and online services are a fair deal for lots of people, the same way a free movie is worth a few commercials. But that should be a choice you make, not the only option you have. Sometimes the network isn't there. Sometimes you just want a conversation that stays in the room.
Past the last cell tower. Trails, backcountry, and search areas where phones show no bars.
When the lines go down. Storms, outages, and emergencies that take the network offline right when neighbors need each other.
When you'd rather keep it local. Talk the way you would face to face, without a company in the middle of the conversation.
A small box that turns the space around it into a shared room. People who are close by can see and hear each other through something everyone already knows how to use: a web browser.
The server makes its own WiFi network. Phones connect straight to it. No cell tower, no internet provider, and no outside connection in between.
No cloud and no third party in the middle. Chat isn't saved to a database, and photos and videos are never saved at all. Text-only logs are generated for testing, on hardware you own, where you can read them, keep them, or wipe them. The code is open source, so you can read exactly what it does.
Nothing to install and no account to make. Chat, voice, a shared drawing canvas, photo sharing, and live cameras, all in a normal browser.
Every room has a presentation alias. Join with it and what you do shows up on everyone's screen at the same time, like a teacher at the front of a class or a guide around a campfire.
Pick an image from the gallery and it becomes the canvas background on every screen at once. Clear the board or the chat for everyone in one tap.
Play, pause, and seek audio and video, and every connected device follows along together.
Send a song link from AnalogArchiveJS in chat and it plays across the room, all from drives on your own network.
Set up a camera and chat station at a trailhead, basecamp, or command post. Anyone within WiFi range can check in and see the live feed, no bars needed.
Keep the block connected during an outage, or just have a local place to talk that doesn't run through anyone else's servers.
Meetings, events, and groups that want to share freely on a server they run themselves, not someone else's.
The software is free and open source under Apache 2.0, so self-hosting it costs nothing. You get the hardware. I'll help you set it up so it works on home WiFi or completely on its own.
No signup. No email. Just pick a room and start.
Default password is the room name all lowercase one word.
Change it anytime at /crud.
View all rooms →