[iwd]

Interesting! I built something really similar last month, though less polished: https://happyhour.ianwdavis.com/

In my case, I let people create groups ("tables") on the fly and hop between them at will, rather than forced mixing. There's a list along the side that shows which people are at each group. Groups with fewer people sort to the top, to encourage people to join those.

I built on top of Jitsi and the meet.jit.si public servers for video chat. The quality hasn't been as good as something like Zoom, but I love how easy it is to embed and customize!

[ottobonn]

Wow, this is exactly the project I have been working on for the past few weeks, down to the abstraction of "tables," "starting a new table," and shuffling around at will! I was even building on top of jitsi. Mine was going to be called "lunchbox"...

It's amazing to me how many people had this idea, and that it seemed not to exist before. I am curious how far we can go to make video chat feel as good as in-person socializing.

[iwd]

My Python code is up on Github under a BSD license, if you want to play with it. https://github.com/iwd32900/happyhour

[lhoff]

Really nice. Also thanks for open source this.

I'm in a student club and we have our own Jitsi instance so we will probably run it on our own infrastructure.

Do you have any plans for a "random" feature? If not would you be open for pull requests?

[iwd]

Hadn't planned on the random feature, but totally open to pull requests!

[andrewicarlson]

Nice! I like that you create parties for anonymous users – that's been in my backlog but I haven't devoted the time to allowing totally anonymous party creation yet.

I'll have to take a look at Jitsi – I've been using Twilio's Programmable Video API.

[iwd]

I didn't realize Twilio did video -- I'll have to take a look!