Pleb Chat is text chat rooms for club house. I built this app after using club house and getting annoyed there was no real way to interact with or respond to speakers in the bigger clubhouse rooms, so I thought a text chat app where plebs could respond or share links (another problem with club house) would be useful. The idea being you would get the link of an ongoing club house room, paste it to the text input, and you'd be routed to a text chat room with other listeners of the same room.

Working nights and weekends I was able to get the app up in running in 2 months. I built the app using React, GraphQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, and Prisma. Auth is managed with Auth0, I'm hosting the client with Netlify and the server code with Heroku (which I found is far easier to use only after struggling with AWS docs for a week). I had fun building it and learned quite a bit doing so. I'm usually on the front end of the stack, so getting some experience working with server code in a low risk environment was good practice. I also had a chance to learn about and use WebSockets and Pub/Sub while building out this app which was cool, since I had never really used either of those before this.

Unfortunately I think I was a bit too slow in releasing it and by the time I had shipped, much of the club house hype had died down. I've commonly read on hacker news building the app is the easy part, getting people in to actually use it is the hard part, which proved to be true for this project as well. Maybe I should have just shipped with known bugs while club house was still cool? Dunno.

Either way, the app is still up (albeit on the free tier of everything, so I'm not sure it'll handle scaling too well) and free to use. If club house every becomes popular again feel free to check it out 🙂