🚀 Jamscout: Yet another "who is online on a near server" tool

[stefan1000]

Maybe someone finds it useful: Jamscout.de

It is yet another web service to see who is online on a nearby Jamulus server:

• Local Calculation: Your location is determined in your browser to compute distances against geo locations from jamulus servers. Idea is that latency correlates somehow with geographic distance.
• Privacy-First: No tracking, no personal data collection, and no server-side logging of your coordinates, IP, activities (see initial dialog)

[stefan1000]

Yet another "look mom what I have vibe coded" application...maybe someone else finds it also helpful.

Install App & Friend notifications 🎸🥁🎹

New: you can install Jamscout like a normal app
and get a notification the moment one of your friends starts playing — even
when the app is closed, when your phone is in your pocket, or when you are
looking at something else entirely.

No app store. No account. No ads. Just a free web app.

---

⚡ Quick start (30 seconds)

1. Install Jamscout like any app — on your phone: browser menu →
   Add to Home screen / Install app. On your computer: the Install
   button in the site header.
2. Add your friends — tap a musician's name in the list; it lights up
   gold.
3. Turn ON “Notifications” in the header and tap Allow when the browser
   asks.
4. Done. The next time one of those friends starts playing, you'll get a
   notification — even if Jamscout is closed.
5. Already jamming? Hit Mark me!, tap your name — and Jamscout stays
   quiet until you're done (see §4).

More details below 👇

---

1. Install Jamscout as an app

Install it = it gets its own icon, opens in its own window, and notifications
work reliably.

Jamscout installed on a tablet — note the little "1" badge on its icon.

The Jamscout app icon on an Android home screen.

Android (Chrome): open https://jamscout.de, tap the Install button
in the header (or ⋮ → Add to Home screen).

iPhone / iPad (Safari): open the site, tap Share (the square with an
arrow) → Add to Home Screen → Add.

Computer (Chrome / Edge): click the Install button in the header, or
the install icon in the address bar.

---

2. Add friends

The idea is simple: mark the musicians you enjoy playing with as friends
(a tap on their name — they turn gold), and Jamscout tells you when any of
them starts playing.

Your friend is highlighted in gold in the room list.

• Tap any musician's name to add or remove them as a friend.
• Friends First (header switch) brings rooms with friends to the top.
• Your friends are stored only on your device — no account, nothing sent.

---

3. Turn on notifications

1. Switch Notifications to On in the header.
2. Your browser asks for permission — tap Allow.
3. From now on, whenever a friend joins a session, you get a notification — in
   the app, on the lock screen, or as a banner on your phone or computer.

A friend-join notification on Windows (Edge).

The same notification in the Android notification shade.

On the Android lock screen — no unlocking needed.

Android quick settings + notification panel.

Good to know

• Each friend is announced once per arrival — no spam from brief drop-outs.
• A notification disappears automatically once that friend has really left
  for a few minutes, and old alerts tidy themselves away after 1½ hours.
• Friends who are already online when you enable notifications won't ping
  you retroactively — you'll only hear about new arrivals from then on.

---

4. Already jamming? Use “Mark me!”

Playing right now and don't want to be interrupted by “a friend joined somewhere
else”? Use Mark me!:

1. Click Mark me! in the header — it turns into “Choose your name…”.
2. Click your own name in the room list. (You need to be in an active
   session — your name must be visible in one of the rooms.)
3. Your name gets a green border ✅ — that's “you”.
4. Done. While marked, Jamscout pauses notifications for you: you're
   already jamming, so friends joining somewhere else won't buzz your phone.

• It clears automatically a few minutes after you leave the session — or
  right away with the ✕ next to the button.
• The green border marks you — friends stay gold, that's a different
  thing (see §2).

---

5. Privacy stays king 👑

• No account, no sign-up, nothing to fill in.
• Your friend list never leaves your device in readable form — for push
  notifications, only an unintelligible fingerprint (a hash) is used; nobody
• We don't know when you're on the site, which rooms you open, or how long
  you stay. Your location is calculated on your device and never sent to our
  server.
• No cookies, no trackers, no ads. Server logs are anonymized.

---

6. Still have questions?

• “Why didn't I get a notification?” — Were you using Mark me! while
  jamming? That pauses them on purpose (see §4). Or was that friend already
  online before you switched notifications on (see §3)? Did you allow the
  permission? Are you using the installed app rather than the plain website?
• “Can you see my friends?” — No. See §5.
• “Do I need an account?” — No, never.

[mcfnord]

I think notifications are a valuable feature.

[pljones]

I can barely read the font.

[mcfnord]

How does the browser geolocate locally?

[stefan1000]

Distance is calculated locally in the browser, as written in the privacy policy:

To show distances to servers, your browser can request its location from a sequence of third-party services (freeipapi.com, ipwho.is, geoapi.info, geoip.vuiz.net) until one succeeds

[dcorson-ticino-com]

Good luck.
The results for my location at least all show the right country.
Otherwise they are pretty random.

[stefan1000]

Its just used clientside to hide the servers that are far away (>1111km) ...for me that was good enough (and correlated well with the ping times - every server beyond 1,111 km showed a ping time higher than 40ms). A few 100km more or less dont really matter here. The geo location is not sent to the server.

Dont know what you mean with "otherwise they are random"?

[dcorson-ticino-com]

I looked at the results from the services above and see that they are all somewhere in Switzerland. None are close to where I am.
But, of course, if we are talking +-1000km it is all the same.

[stefan1000]

Its not +/- 1000km, was talking about 1000km +/- 100km dont really make a difference.
You can check with this page on how the client app computes your location and which provider was choosen
https://jamscout.de/client-admin.html

If you can share the results (including the console.log of a fresh session) I can take a look what is going wrong.