Hi HN!

flat.social is a fun spatial online meeting app for remote teams and communities. It's largely built like a web multiplayer game, and the 3D virtual spaces are highly customisable with elements and activities (I recently added surfing!).

Live demo to try it out: https://app.flat.social/f/demo-flat

Here's a quick demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GeinBNqL23s

It's a solo, bootstrapped project built with Three.js, LiveKit and Rapier for physics. I built the first version during the pandemic and posted it here back then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31833415

I had a couple of months off this year, so I locked myself in an (almost) jungle house in Brazil and rebuilt it into what I've always wanted it to be.

Would love to hear what you think!

I don't know man, I think I am not the right audience for this. I think online meetings are fine as is, I want to spend less time on them and more time connecting in real life.

I have been working remotely for a decade now, with fully remote teams, and we never felt the need for a deeper bonding in the form of work meetings that are more casual.

That said, if we want this kind of experience, online gaming already gives us that. I see lots of members of the team hanging out by discord and in gaming platforms.

Looks cool, but I don't want it. That's just my opinion.

Performance is poor with frequent stutters.

I think we peaked at https://www.gather.town/

The only on-par open source solution is https://workadventu.re/, but it is impossible to self-host to the point that one would think they're doing it on purpose so that you pay them for hosting.

Those videos of the actual webcam feeds are AI-generated, right? If I were you I would at least use the videos of real people from the original demo, if not try to have another live demo. Maybe not the highest priority but it does affect the first impression of the product and whether people assume it's a vibecoded mess under the hood or not.

Anyways, is source available anywhere?

As someone who has seen and used (and disliked) many similar pieces of software, something about this feels much better and natural (I think it's that your avatar is just a circle with your video on it). Great job on nailing the feel of it!

Really lovely concept. I think your welcome map is too complex seems like that should be simplified for a good first experience for more devices. I'd like to be able to rotate around the map but seems like it's fixed in one direction. I picked up 5 balloons and started to fly but i couldn't get down.

This looks cool! I think I would use it more as an online platform for friends rather than work or business. Maybe lean more into the social / games aspects

Sounds interesting - especially as gather.town no longer offers an event option. However, the landing page uses 100% CPU and stutters a lot. Also, signup does not work for me, with https://app.flat.social/api/auth/signup returning 403 forbidden:

  {"success":false,"error":"Verification failed, please try again"}

The UX sits in an interesting hybrid place between Gather App and Katmai - would be fun to try out with collaborators sometime

> I had a couple of months off this year, so I locked myself in an (almost) jungle house in Brazil

Tell us more about this experience. Very interesting!

Okay, you got me on the first impressions. signed up. also, use a demo video which has real people doing those activities and smiling etc. A little bit of authenticity will go a long way here.

Having a birds eye view changes the dynamic of an in person event because you can more easily observe who makes a beeline for who. But as someone who gets a headache from first person games I still prefer birds eye anyway.

This is so cool, i am going to try this with my friends, i will let you know about the experience.

Really fun, reminds me of this app my company use to use during Covid https://workadventu.re/

Very impressive, well done!

This is super neat.

i call this the end game of social media

This is really great and I hope it succeeds. I am waiting for a service that combines the virtual spaces concepts of Habbo Hotel into digital meeting spaces. I think Meta VR attempted this but it was too clunky (requires a headset). Mozilla Hubs attempted this too but it was too similar to Second Life and Roblox in the sense that things were not modular enough and it takes too long to do simple things.

This is amazing!

this is unbearably slow and unusable on Safari.

It's a cute social app. The moment it becomes forced "bonding" with your coworkers is the moment it gets weird and dystopian

Also the moment it gets a public room, you're getting a dick and balls chasing that soccer ball

Just saying

I would work on affordances for when people with 0 gaming experience need to join, maybe a flat or simplified mode that someone can opt in to.

I have a lot of experience testing a defunct spatial conferencing app during the pandemic and gamers had fun with it but people with no gaming experience universally hated it and wanted nothing to do with it. There were no affordances or instructions that made a dent after months of trying.