Show HN: Distributed – Live social chat app to help remote teams stay in sync | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Distributed – Live social chat app to help remote teams stay in sync

joindistributed.com

47 pointsasim19 comments

The pitch doesn’t tell me what’s unique about this app vs. google meet which is what we use - and that has built-in chat. If we want to involve people not in the call we can synchronously use a slack channel.

Without downloading the app and convincing a few others to try it I have no meaningful way to evaluate it, and since I don’t have issues with my current solution I have zero incentive to evaluate an alternative without at least an obvious advantage.

If you see the screenshot on the landing page you'll notice the layout. It's laid out like slack but includes audio/video bubbles in the room. The idea is that we don't really want to spend a lot of time staring at each other, it's not natural. Going fully remote during Covid we found slack on its own wasn't enough for us and zoom or Google meet just forced us into this staring contest that felt unnatural. With distributed small bubbles provide "presence" for the person without necessarily focusing on them.

Hey all Distributed is a live social chat app on the Web and Mobile which helps you stay connected with your friends, team and colleagues at work. We initially built this as a demo of our API development platform but it turned into something much more. We spend 2-3 hours on it everyday and thought it might be useful for others too.

It looks like a combination of slack and video. Your video appears as a small bubble at the top of the screen, you have the choice to enable video and mic or just listen. For the most part the text based chat is just a way to share links and interesting content while chatting over voice. We've purposely limited group sizes to under 24 and kept everything private by default.

The experience is best on the web. Head directly to https://distributed.app for that and let us know what you think.

Note: just hacking away at some bugs on the android app related to creating groups and sending invites. All the source code for both web and mobile can be seen on https://github.com/m3o/distributed and https://github.com/m3o/distributed-mobile

I love the casual feel of this app. I would just keep this humming along in the background during code sprints and general digital (a)syncing with friends.

Thanks Joseph!

https://distributed.app breaks Safari's Back function.

Thanks for letting us know

Came to say the same thing.

That’s extremely annoying and I wonder how you can break that unless you purposefully try to capture the event for going back which is a big No-No IMHO.

Might be a react based issue. Can't say we're actively trying to break it. Doesn't appear to be an issue in chrome.

I've been seeing a lot of 90's style clothing coming back into style. I guess everything old is eventually new again.

Around 2005 we purchased Marratech [1], which was comparable to this, always on video for multiple people, chat, whiteboards, etc. Back then, it cost about $10,000 for a license. It was eventually acquired by Google and became their video product.

The only problem wasn't the technology, it was the social aspect of always on video. We did it for the same reasons they are pitching, virtual office. In our case, it didn't work. We do have a functional virtual office now using Slack, Zoom, etc. On-demand and async communication seems to work far better than this general concept did.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marratech

The key thing to understand is async doesn't replace sync. There is still the need for human connection, they is still the need for synchronous comms. It just turns out one flat medium of either text or video on their own don't work well and no one is playing with the video format. We're all staring at 4:3 squares or black boxes. When you actually shrink the video and make it all about "presence", the experience drastically changes. That's our finding anyway, and thats why you're seeing many others go down this same kind of bubble photo/video route. But thanks for the history lesson.

Congrats on the launch!

It seems like you're pushing for video-chat-as-a-hangout, which I like a lot! My company has been doing a modified version of this for about a year and we like it a lot.

Can you talk some more about what makes your product specifically better at serving that need than existing video chat apps? Is the value that good text chat is available in the app rather than needing to use a different app, or is there something else that makes it better at the "hanging out" use case?

Thanks! It was two things. We found that we were sharing links and content in slack while using video so it played a central role to communication rather than being an after thought like in zoom. It means we can do shared whiteboard and other interesting things down the line. We also wanted to feel the "presence" of people without staring at them. In a social setting you're not really staring at people. I don't think technology has replicated that. Our hack was just to shrink the video and it really worked.

I'd love to hear about what Distributed's strength is, and why it's better than the alternatives like Zoom, Teams video, Slack video, etc.

Distributed combines text, audio and video in one place. Text plays a central role just as it does in slack. It's how we share links or interesting content. In things like zoom it's an after thought. The difference with our audio/video focus is that a person isn't a huge square, they're a small bubble. We really had zoom fatigue during Covid but found we were missing an office atmosphere. What we wanted was to feel the "presence" of someone without staring at them. Turns out deemphasizing the size of the video helps tremendously. We find it's a killer feature and keeps us on distributed for longer.

For something that is text central I don't see what this would accomplish for me that I'm not currently doing with the Matrix protocol (Element GUI client + self hosted synapse daemon) as a Slack replacement.

I think the difference here is that we're audio/video first. The goal is to get on video and chat with text inline so you can share links and content thats relevant to the conversation. Video being a small bubble gives you user presence without taking up the whole screen or causing you to stare at people.

Pricing?

It's free. We charge for GIFs (no joke)

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