4 ms·

Lessons from building multiplayer browsers

57 points by alejandrohacks 5mo ago

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
alejandrohacks 5mo ago
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.
- keepamovin 5mo ago
  This line was golden: Sometimes we were iterating on the vision when we should have been iterating closer to user signal. The difference is subtle but it matters a lot. One converges toward something people want. The other converges toward a more elegant version of something people don't. I’m building a way for people to build on top of the browser (https://www.hyper-frame.art https://www.hyper-frame.art). One take away for me from your article was GTM is a bigger moat than technicals (which are brutal in the fork route you went)
  - alejandrohacks 5mo ago
    thanks! hyper-frame seems really cool! I shall try it out on a side project :)
    - keepamovin 5mo ago
      Warms my heart :) lmk if you want an API key: cris@dosaygo.com
- ale 5mo ago
  Very interesting stuff. Are any builds of Sail still available for use?
  - alejandrohacks 5mo ago
    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
_alphageek 5mo ago
[dead]
dimes 5mo ago
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.
- alejandrohacks 5mo ago
  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!
- cadamsdotcom 5mo ago
  Are we doppelgängers? :) I built a multiplayer system in 2020 that let you explore a 2D map with a little avatar, and “go into” experiences you’d find on the map where there’d be a video chat with whoever happened to be on that page at the time. Kind of like an “overworld and dungeon” model except nothing to install. It was amazingly serendipitous. The platform hosted 2020’s online Burning Man & we did lots more - corporate events, parties.. It was a time of amazing experimentation & creativity. Humans do amazing creative things under constraints. Would love to learn more about what you built!
tekacs 5mo ago
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!)
- alejandrohacks 5mo ago
  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”.
loa_in_ 5mo ago
One of the best interactive designs of the future I keep wishing were fleshed out is Eagle Mode. : https://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/ https://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/
- andai 5mo ago
  Hey, it's a lot like the one from Jurassic Park! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_System_Visualizer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_System_Visualizer
ppqqrr 5mo ago
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 https://blancs.io
jFriedensreich 5mo ago
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
keepamovin 5mo ago
I wonder what yc co hyperbeam has to say about this? Are they still in that space?
TrailingArbutus 5mo ago
quite interesting! I had approached this via a completely different direction back during lockdown as well (haha on the top comment), and it was an extremely similar experience to what they described. It's a really fun side project but won't have many use-cases then the occasional amusement (which I personally really like, but learnt that things like that don't sell easily)

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

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.

keepamovin 5mo ago
This line was golden: Sometimes we were iterating on the vision when we should have been iterating closer to user signal. The difference is subtle but it matters a lot. One converges toward something people want. The other converges toward a more elegant version of something people don't. I’m building a way for people to build on top of the browser (https://www.hyper-frame.art https://www.hyper-frame.art). One take away for me from your article was GTM is a bigger moat than technicals (which are brutal in the fork route you went)
- alejandrohacks 5mo ago
  thanks! hyper-frame seems really cool! I shall try it out on a side project :)
  - keepamovin 5mo ago
    Warms my heart :) lmk if you want an API key: cris@dosaygo.com
ale 5mo ago
Very interesting stuff. Are any builds of Sail still available for use?
- alejandrohacks 5mo ago
  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

_alphageek 5mo ago

[dead]

dimes 5mo ago

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.

alejandrohacks 5mo ago
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!
cadamsdotcom 5mo ago
Are we doppelgängers? :) I built a multiplayer system in 2020 that let you explore a 2D map with a little avatar, and “go into” experiences you’d find on the map where there’d be a video chat with whoever happened to be on that page at the time. Kind of like an “overworld and dungeon” model except nothing to install. It was amazingly serendipitous. The platform hosted 2020’s online Burning Man & we did lots more - corporate events, parties.. It was a time of amazing experimentation & creativity. Humans do amazing creative things under constraints. Would love to learn more about what you built!

tekacs 5mo ago

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!)

alejandrohacks 5mo ago
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”.

loa_in_ 5mo ago

One of the best interactive designs of the future I keep wishing were fleshed out is Eagle Mode. : https://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/ https://eaglemode.sourceforge.net/

andai 5mo ago
Hey, it's a lot like the one from Jurassic Park! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_System_Visualizer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_System_Visualizer

ppqqrr 5mo ago

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 https://blancs.io

jFriedensreich 5mo ago

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

keepamovin 5mo ago

I wonder what yc co hyperbeam has to say about this? Are they still in that space?

TrailingArbutus 5mo ago

quite interesting! I had approached this via a completely different direction back during lockdown as well (haha on the top comment), and it was an extremely similar experience to what they described. It's a really fun side project but won't have many use-cases then the occasional amusement (which I personally really like, but learnt that things like that don't sell easily)