is there a name for this? I've seen it all over recently. Ente products are like that; it's self-hostable but you've gotta really want it.

One trademark of this : the first steps of install are easy, but then it progresses into this quagmire of no-docs/old-docs/presets that favor the company somehow.

one of these things, (maybe ente photos/auth?) were self-hostable but there was a secret button on the mobile app that had to be known about to input a server URI outside of the cloud host to connect the app to the server backend that's self-hosted. Why would you go to that extent if not to add friction?

PS. there is also a bunch of graphic tiers which suit more older machines. If you click on the top right there is a menu which has a graphics tab. It should switch automatically after a while too.

We also had an issue with a few people getting motion sickness from any 3D games, so any 3D virtual meeting space was out of the question for our company. A flat 2D UI would be preferable to the "low performance" option that this project provides, which is quite jarring.

We had to use Gather during covid, as a constant presence virtual office, all day long. It was an exhausting stream of endless distractions, the spatial audio meant people would just start randomly talking to you. But unless you had it pulled up on a monitor dedicated only to it, the real experience was a background tab of disembodied voices playing through your speakers at random, it was jarring and inhumane.