tawk.space

Social video chats

Website: https://tawk.space/

The concept

Tawk is built around the idea of a salon. No, not those places you get haircuts, but 18th century French Enlightenment salons. Aristocratic men and women gathered to discuss politics, art, literature, and more during this "age of conversation".

Now, in the 21st century, the internet can bring us to a new "digital age of conversation". While text chats are often plagued with anonymous trolling, forcing users to face their peers produces deeper, more satisfying conversations.

Tawk is meant to be simple and flexible to use.

• There is no login--simply share a link to your space (https://tawk.space/your-space).
• Each space can have multiple chat groups. Drag your video to create one or mouseover another group to hear what they're saying. This is an excellent way to create "breakout" groups.

Obligatory thanks

Tawk was made possible through several helpful projects:

• Statebus, a realtime database
• Agora.io, the video backend
• DesignEvo free logo designer

Embed in your website

Insert this code into your html somewhere:

<script src="https://download.agora.io/sdk/web/AgoraRTC_N-4.1.0.js"></script>
<script src='https://tawk.space/hark.js'></script>
<script src="https://invisible-college.github.io/diffsync/diffsync.js"></script>
<script src="https://tawk.space/client/shared.coffee"></script>
<script src="https://tawk.space/client/tawk.coffee"></script>

And if you aren't using statebus already, include this too:

<script src="https://stateb.us/client6.js"></script>

Now you can place a TAWK widget anywhere on a statebus page like this:

TAWK({name: 'username', space: '/', height: 500, width: 500})

Set up your own tawk instance

Clone tawk.space and install dependencies:

git@github.com:invisible-college/tawk.space.git
cd tawk.space
npm install

You must set up certs for https in a folder called certs/ in the tawk.space repo. This will be used by both tawk.space and statebus. Put the public key in certs/certificate and private key in certs/private-key.

sudo ln -s /etc/letsencrypt/live/<your-domain>/fullchain.pem certs/certificate
sudo ln -s /etc/letsencrypt/live/<your-domain>/privkey.pem certs/private-key

Finally, run it! Again, you might want to use screen.

sudo node index

Your tawk instance is running at https://your-domain

Contributing

PR's and issues are very welcome!