Huddle: a real-time community platform
2026Real-time
A community platform with servers, channels, roles and permissions, DMs, and peer-to-peer voice, video and screen share, built on its own WebSocket gateway and WebRTC.
Problem
Real-time apps look simple from the outside, but the hard parts are invisible: presence, permissions that stay consistent everywhere, ordering of messages, and calls that connect across different networks.
Solution
Huddle is a full community platform. A Fastify server exposes a REST API and a WebSocket gateway that pushes every message, reaction, typing indicator and presence change to the right people. Servers have text and voice channels, roles with permission bits, invites, DMs and group DMs, friends, file sharing, stickers and notifications. Voice, video and screen share run as a WebRTC mesh, with signalling relayed through the gateway. Data lives in Node's built-in SQLite, so it runs with no database server or Docker.
Outcome
Two browsers can sign in, join a server and talk, call and share screens with each other in real time. The server ships with 48 tests covering the REST API, the gateway, permissions and voice signalling, and the product and architecture are written up in a full spec.