alejandrohacks

unfortunately no, Sail was not an offline first app (thought it did have a sync engine for multiplayer) and because the backend is no longer available the builds don't work anymore

so many people did! the whole watching YouTube/streaming things with friends vibe was so fun haha

and now it feels like a bunch of people are building canvas based products again, but for testing different image gen outputs on a canvas, except now you can vibe code them too!

Yeah I think that framing fits. The technical complexity in Sail and Muddy was real, but hidden in a way that didn’t translate into perceived user value.

We had some theories for how it could land big, but none strongly resonated. It wasn’t just “put websites in another app.” We were hoping multiplayer would do something similar to what Notion and Airtable did. In my mind, those products “land big” because they feel like docs and sheets on steroids. Blocks, databases, formulas, all inside surfaces people spend so much time in, so the step change feels obvious.

With Sail/Muddy, the bet was that multiplayer browser surfaces would land big and help with collaboration, alignment, handoff, etc. Someone sends you the exact things to click on inside a message, you pin them to come back to later, no more switching tabs, you can see what other people are doing. Some users did see Sail as a tool for big research projects, accumulating tabs and sources spatially, though mostly single player.

In both products, we were also rendering browser tabs and web content inside their own processes. Sail on an infinite canvas, Muddy inside a shared chat workspace. Architecturally, there’s a big difference between “this is an iframe in a web app” and “this is a real browser tab with full capabilities.” But that distinction doesn’t land unless people feel a step change in what they can do. To most users, it just read as embeds. They weren’t thinking about iframe limitations, process isolation, site compatibility, browser architecture, or the experience that enabled. And they shouldn’t have had to.

So yeah, not small in ambition or product theory, but small in perceived divergence. The system was ambitious, but the delta users felt was often more like “a nicer way to look at web stuff inside another interface,” not “this changes how I work with people or how I use my computer”.

thanks! hyper-frame seems really cool! I shall try it out on a side project :)

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 see the value of apprenticeship, learning skills on demand. However, I don't think everything should necessary be learned only on the base of apprenticeship. Correct me if I am wrong but I am guessing you probably did not imply this. Lessons that shape your worldview, those that shape you as a person, are extremely valuable and should always be taught. Also learning things out of curiosity and not necessarily on demand is also extremely valuable. Sometimes you can only connect the dots looking backwards.