Dense polycules are rendered too tightly

[zorae]

Larger polycules often render with clusters of people so closely packed as to be illegible in the graph (unless you manually move people around). Something about the physics causes people that should move to the edge of the graph – because they only have a relationship with one person – to instead get stuck in a cluster of people.

[deniz-blue]

ok wtf are people actually using this
time to go back to work ig

[zorae]

Absolutely! I really appreciate the work and the thoughtful design decisions that you've put into this dennis!

[deniz-blue]

Thank you so much! I want to ask something though, I kinda wanna tackle the problem where the entire polycule is sharing a password - its a bit janky and idk seems bad to me. Would it make sense for everyone to go into the site and define their own connections to others? I dont know how to achieve this other than introducing authentication (which I think is eugh yuck) pfff, any ideas?

[zorae]

Personally, I don't mind sharing a password, because I don't often have other people collaborating anyways. Individual accounts would be cool, especially when you're getting into really large (>50) polycules, but they would require a lot of complexity.

First, you would need different user permissions: You'd still want to have an admin who's able to edit the whole polycule without relying on others to make accounts. Guests would be limited to editing one degree of separation.

But then you'd run into situations where guest user A wants to add people >1º from them. Not every one of those people might be willing to create an account, so would A have to ask the admin to do the edits for them?

You'd also need to figure out the invite system. Are guests allowed to invite more guests, or do all invites have to come directly from the admin? The admin would also need a way to manage and remove guests.

Maybe a simpler way to do it would be:
When the admin edits a person in the polycule, they can create a guest link for that person. That link would function just like the polycule's normal view link, except that you can edit that specific person + 1º. That way, there would be no accounts.