[OkayPhysicist]

This is the billion-dollar problem in VoIP. I call it the "cocktail party problem", because a cocktail party is the most extreme example. In meatspace, you're able to drift between conversations subtly queuing to the other participants in a breakout conversation that you're engaging with them, while still being able to pick up on nearby conversations which you can choose to swap to.

A multi-call system like a Discord server represents a small step, with the ability to see that conversations are happening in other calls, and maybe get a guess of what they're doing thanks to live presence, but it's far from a complete solution.

[neuronerdgirl]

Gather Town was tackling this issue surprisingly well during COVID, but anytime I tried to convince people to use it they defaulted back to Zoom because Gather was too confusing. I think it would take a real paradigm shift from the "call with video" model to get decent adoption of something like that, and now that it's so expensive to use Gather I don't see how they can get enough exposure to really convince the public at large.