Since leaving Slack, I've been building Pop with a new team. The first product we launched in 2020 is essentially Screenhero 2.0 (pop.com). Since then, we've been building an expanded product: a virtual office for remote teams, which is now almost ready for launch (there's a waitlist at https://new.pop.com). We've even got Wayland support in! We have plans to open source a part of the Wayland piece, which Petal could potentially use too.
I do love this space, and wish more tools were about live collaboration — it feels so much more human and fun than single-player mode. I hope Petal becomes a growing community that thrives for the long haul!
It’s a tool that helps further human connection, imo. And we could all use a little more of that atm.
I'm in Utah, and Till is in CA, so it's vital to our daily work.
Truly I don't understand how people do remote work or collaboration these days... maybe they don't? Or maybe Zoom/Meet are good enough (I really truly think they aren't, it's an abusive horrible experience every time I am forced to use Zoom or Meet for anything).
There just seems to be something sticky about them, but the people who try a CoScreen, Tuple, Pop, or other tool designed around collaboration I think become converted permanently, but getting people into that funnel is very very hard.
We'd love to work with you and see what you'll build, now that Petal is out in the open for anyone to use, jam on, and make it your own.
> The media server — traffic stays yours
The product looks cool! It’s just… reading that sentence makes me __immediately__ lose all interest.
We can work on it. Obviously it's Till and I working on the copy, and unashamedly we are using Claude to help expedite it so we can focus on the fun stuff... but yes, I absolutely hate this crap too.
Maybe you can contribute some of your private innovations upstream to Petal ;)
It's on our product roadmap to have a mode to support this though.
Some of our engineers have discussed a totally p2p iroh based video transport and other ideas.
LiveKit was the fastest/easiest way to get it to market, and it was something Till and I volunteered to pay for at the moment so we have an off-the-shelf cloud offering that is free and usable.
From that perspective it has worked great.
Given CoScreen's very recent demise, we felt this space deserved some love still.
Hopefully you try it out some time, and provide feedback.