Thread by @EpistemicHope

Something that I am surprised and confused by:

I would have expected that when the pandemic hit that there would be a flurry of innovative solutions to the problem of "meetings and social interactions online."

But it seems like there was very little of that.

There's Zoom, of course, and a few platforms on the model of gather.town.

But...that's about it?

(Maybe there are lots more, but I haven't heard of them?)

I'm thinking about this now because the Rationality Community had its secular solstice tonight, which was held on a custom app that was designed to allow a few hundred people from all over the world to sing songs together, without it being terrible.

There were some minor snags, but the software basically worked.

It seems like many groups (a housemate suggests churches) would have a similar need. Why wasn't the market already serving that need?

Or take go.rally.video, which is like Zoom, but explores a somewhat different part of the design space. (For instance, there are "tables" that you can easily move between), and you can set it so that you can hear ambient sound from other tables.)

It gives you a different set of affordances, for more flexible mingling, or exercise pairing, or what have you.

I would have guessed that there are at least 10 "simulated in-person" niches like those two, and I would have guessed that entrepreneurial software engineers would have jumped on it and explored the space, over the past year.

Did that happen and I'm just not seeing it?

Or is there something that I'm missing about the world, such that I shouldn't have expected this to happen?