Activities (Microapps)

Discord-style in-call activities — widget apps that appear as extra tiles inside the voice call view, alongside real participants.

How it works

When an activity is added to a room, it's stored as a Matrix im.vector.modular.widgets state event. Every client reads this event and renders the widget as a full-width tile in the call grid. The 🚀 Activities button in the call control bar opens the app picker.

User clicks 🚀 → picks YouTube → state event written to room
→ all clients read state → YouTube tile appears in call grid
→ host controls playback → sync commands sent as room events
→ all clients seek to the same timestamp

Available Activities

YouTube Together

Watch YouTube videos in sync. One person controls playback; everyone follows.

Feature	Detail
Sync mechanism	Matrix room state + command events
Drift compensation	timestamp + (Date.now() − issuedAt) / 1000
Late-joiners	Current position stored in room state; new clients seek on load

Supported URLs:

• https://youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID
• https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID
• https://youtube.com/shorts/VIDEO_ID

Spotify Together

Share a Spotify track, album, or playlist. Everyone sees the same embed.

Note: True playback sync requires Spotify Premium + OAuth per user. This embeds the same URL for all members; each controls their own playback locally.

Polls (optional, requires Docker)

Create and vote on polls directly in the room. Powered by nordeck/matrix-poll-widget.

Whiteboard (optional, requires Docker)

Real-time collaborative whiteboard. Powered by nordeck/matrix-neoboard-widget.

Setting up Polls & Whiteboard

YouTube and Spotify are built in — no setup needed. Polls and Whiteboard require self-hosted Docker containers.

1. Configure environment variables

# Public URL where users' browsers reach the polls container
MESH_POLLS_URL=https://polls.your-domain.com

# Public URL where users' browsers reach the whiteboard container
MESH_WHITEBOARD_URL=https://whiteboard.your-domain.com

2. Start the containers

# Start both:
docker compose --profile microapps up -d

# Then restart mesh so URLs are picked up:
docker compose restart mesh

3. Expose via reverse proxy

# Polls
server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    server_name polls.your-domain.com;
    location / {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3001;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        add_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin *;
    }
}

# Whiteboard
server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    server_name whiteboard.your-domain.com;
    location / {
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:3003;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        add_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin *;
    }
}

No rebuild needed

At container startup, docker-entrypoint.sh generates /app/config-microapps.js with the URLs. Changing them only requires restarting the container — no rebuild.