alt Hacker NewsLessons from building multiplayer browsers
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One of the best interactive designs of the future I keep wishing were fleshed out is Eagle Mode.
I finally wrote something about my time at sail/muddy, the last startup I was at, where we were trying to build a multiplayer browser, and a few lessons that stayed with me.
I mostly just hope it’s interesting to people thinking about new ambitious interfaces right now. with AI.
I would be curious what you think of the idea of Sail and Muddy being... small. Technically complex, but small in the mind of the user. Not lacking in features (you talked about that), but 'feeling small/bounded, and therefore with small divergence' to the user. Does that... fit at all with your mental model of them?
I ask because I feel like Linear, Vercel, Figma, Notion, hell even Airtable... landed 'big' (felt like a big step change) with users when they arrived for most (I was a super super early user of Notion because my friend angel invested).
I used Sail and Muddy back when and... the small vs big distinction feels like my perception of the divergence between those things that get washed out by this effect and those that don't.
(also DM-ed you!)
I wonder what yc co hyperbeam has to say about this? Are they still in that space?
This post is a gem. I wanted to build something like this for 10 years but shied away until last year because your journey seemed exactly what would happen going down that road in a world not ready yet.
I started with regular valve inspired "playtesting" with users on prototypes which showed:
- Power users love canvas and multiplayer but only need it in distinct product or company phases which last a few weeks or months max, outside these phases they need that maybe once every one or two weeks which is not enough to stick to a new browser - outside of the usage, they feel burdened by mental overhead of collaboration or canvas features and much prefer simplicity - the world does not need another closed source browser, VC is fundamentally incompatible with what is needed, so any step after joining yc was doomed from the start
i'd use a 2D canvas browser. not sure why anyone would need live multiplayer for their browser, just let them save canvas state to file and share it. that's how it works with Blancs. https://blancs.io
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I also built a canvas-based, multiplayer product during the pandemic (ohyay).
The product was social-event focused (classes, festivals, etc.) so we focused on multiplayer audio-video experiences rather than general purpose browsing.
One of my favorite memories was when someone used our collaborative YouTube playback to set up a karaoke room. WebRTC added a little latency, but it was close enough to work.