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Hiroba is an open-source, always-on presence application developed by Ludo Technologies and designed specifically for remote teams seeking a more natural sense of togetherness during the workday. Rather than relying on scheduled calls or chat threads, Hiroba places team members on a shared 2D floor where everyone can see at a glance who is currently around. From this shared space, users can walk their avatar over to a colleague to initiate spatial voice conversation, mimicking the spontaneous interactions of a physical office, or they can page a teammate directly when a quick exchange is needed. The application's voice functionality is built on WebRTC peer-to-peer technology, which means audio travels directly between participants and never passes through the server, an architectural choice with clear implications for privacy and reduced server load. Hiroba falls into the remote collaboration and team presence software category, serving organizations that operate distributed or fully remote workforces and want lightweight, persistent communication tooling. Deployment is flexible: teams may use the hosted edition maintained by the publisher for minimal setup, or they may self-host the server component, which is written in Rust, giving organizations full control over their infrastructure and data. The software is currently at version 0.1.34, and a total of four versions have been released to date, reflecting an active but early-stage development cycle consistent with its pre-1.0 versioning. Because it is open source, Hiroba also offers transparency into its codebase, allowing teams to inspect, audit, and potentially contribute to the project. Overall, Hiroba addresses a common challenge for distributed teams—the loss of ambient awareness and casual conversation—by combining persistent presence, spatial audio, and direct paging into a single, self-hostable platform suitable for modern remote work environments.
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