Huddle
A private, invite-only coordination hub for business networking groups.
Huddle is built for the kind of groups that meet weekly, share leads, and want to amplify each other's businesses online — BNI chapters, masterminds, industry roundtables, and any networking group that wants to grow its members' social media reach without each person having to do it alone.
What Huddle does
- One feed for the whole group. Members' Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn posts are aggregated automatically into a single live feed.
- Invite-only access. Admins create and manage invites. There's no public sign-up. New members onboard through a simple Google login flow once they've been invited.
- Searchable member directory. Find any member by name, business, or specialty.
- Live post board. Submission, filters, support queue, and support action tracking — so the group can systematically engage with each other's posts instead of relying on memory.
- Public-link fallback. If a member can't connect a particular platform (or the platform's API is restrictive), they can paste any public post URL and Huddle pulls a clean preview.
- Digest emails. Members get periodic summaries of new posts, plus a participation report that admins can use to spot the engaged members and the quiet ones.
How the social aggregation actually works
Most "social aggregator" tools depend on official platform APIs — and those APIs change constantly. (Meta's Basic Display API was deprecated in December 2024, breaking a lot of tools that relied on it overnight.)
Huddle was built knowing that. The system pulls from multiple sources with graceful fallbacks:
- YouTube — official RSS feeds (stable, no API key required)
- Instagram — RSS-Bridge (a self-hosted bridge that converts public profiles into RSS)
- Any public URL — Open Graph metadata fetching with a clean generic preview as last resort
Members don't need to connect anything to share. Paste a URL, Huddle handles the rest.
Tech stack
| Layer | Technology | |---|---| | Frontend | React + Vite + Tailwind | | Backend | Fastify (Node.js) with cookie sessions | | Database | PostgreSQL with code-based migrations | | Auth | Google OAuth (invite-gated) | | Aggregation | YouTube RSS, Instagram via RSS-Bridge, Open Graph preview fetcher | | Email | Resend with local logging fallback | | Containerization | Docker Compose | | Reverse proxy | nginx |
What's already shipping
The current build covers Phases 1 through 4 of the original product spec:
- Invite-only access flow with admin-created invites and invite acceptance
- Google OAuth sign-in for active members
- Member profile onboarding and editing
- Searchable member directory
- Admin metrics, invite management, and member activation toggles
- Live post board with submission, filters, support queue, and support action tracking
- Public-link fallback for any post
- Real feed-ingestion seam for YouTube RSS and Instagram via RSS-Bridge, plus admin-triggered refresh
- Digest email previews and sends, plus participation scoring for members and admins
- Shared domain types between frontend and backend
- PostgreSQL-backed persistence with code-based migrations
Why this matters
Networking groups already work. The problem is the work is invisible. Members refer business in person, sometimes show up to each other's posts, but rarely have a systematic way to see who's actively contributing and who's coasting.
Huddle makes the engagement layer measurable. Admins see participation. Members see what's new. The group's collective social presence grows because the path of least resistance is now to engage, not to forget.
Strategic principle
Ship value before platform bureaucracy. Phase 1 was built first so the group has something useful immediately while longer-running platform reviews (like Meta App Review for native Instagram integration) run in parallel. The product never blocks on someone else's approval queue.