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Comment by ColinWright | Hacker News Reader

Gather.Town does all that, and more.

My team has had success with using Gather.Town as well! The only downside is that it is a little unwieldy, in that you have to be careful where you are positioned so that you don't accidentally lose contact. The "rules" of what constitutes a shared space and when you have to rely on proximity, are also a little unclear.

They're configurable. In our Xmas party house the entire kitchen is one broadcast domain, like the kitchen at a party. But in the local pub we built for Friday evenings we have "booths" and you must sit down in the booth to talk to people in that booth. By default it's just proximity, so like a real pub there were always two or three girls in the toilets having presumably a private chat.

So you do need somebody technical to make the space work how you need, and if your users are all non-technical you probably only want one type of rule everywhere or it'll confuse them.

It's down to the design of the space. We made our own, and "Private Spaces" were visually distinguished by "carpets" ... it made a huge difference. The rules for shared space vs proximity are very clear, but the design of the graphics need to be clear and consistent.

If you do that, it works a treat.

Gather.Town is interesting, but it has its own issues. We just used it last Friday for a company offsite, and these issues killed the experience for myself and a few others:

1. You don’t see who is speaking when there are many people present— you have to scroll through participants to find the person talking. Lots of new employees, I didn’t know who was talking about half the time

2. Connection issues. I couldn’t hear the speaker but others could, for extended periods of time. Missed entire presentations due to this unfortunately, as I couldn’t hear or have any means of connecting to the speaker.

Don’t get me wrong it’s fun software, but it’s not ready to be your rock solid all-hands replacement quite yet. Had the pleasure of experiencing Welcome at one of the YC networking events, and that worked really well, curious to hear if they’re interested in filling this gap

> Connection issues. I couldn’t hear the speaker but others could, for extended periods of time. Missed entire presentations due to this ...

Was the speaker at a podium? Were they spotlighted? Were you close to them?

There are several reasons why you might not have been able to connect that are part of the design. We found initially people were confused by the connection rules, but once they got the hang of it, it all "just worked".

I agree completely that it takes time to get used to, and perhaps you did have genuine connection issues, but we ran with 150 to 200 people for 48 hours without any significant[0] identified connection issues, which is why I wonder if it was mis-identification of a "symptom".

I'll check out "Welcome".

[0] There were occasions when people needed to reload the tab, but doing so always fixed the problem.

As for the connection issues, we were all next to each other at a conference room table, not an issue of proximity. I was able to hear the person at first, then they cut off and didn’t come back, even after reloading the page it seemed but I only tried once and then gave up to be honest :p

FWIW the person I could no longer hear was located across the globe, so maybe that’s related.

I apologize for not having a more thorough write up of what happened, but it was certainly a real issue.

Hey Cory! CEO of Gather.Town here. Connection issues are always our top priority, and at this point, we're chasing down and squashing the last 1% of bugs. If you run into this in the future, reporting a bug will help us solve the issue! (Grape icon > send feedback/bug)

As for the other issue, active speaker detection is on our near-term roadmap. It's become more pressing for us too, as our team has grown and no longer fits in one page :P

Thanks for the feedback!

Good problems to have :)

I’ll keep the feedback method in mind for future usages!

Also, I get it, having started to work with the WebRTC stack myself. While the service is free to use I think I can stomach a few issues while it’s actively being worked on :)

Worth checking out one of their 50+ competitors too! https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1R5DXWtz4H7eIT5VbGYJE...

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