my favorite size for a group conversation irl is 2-4 people and usually i hope that in any larger group the conversation naturally fragments into smaller clusters of 2-4 people. larger than that and conversations risk getting taken over by the person with the fastest tempo
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by "tempo" i don't exactly mean the person who talks the fastest although that's correlated. i mean the person who interrupts the most quickly after someone else says something. ime almost always male, almost always someone who is not tracking quiet slow ppl in the conversation
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in a 5+ person conversation with a person with fast tempo i get frustrated by the sense that i have to increase my tempo to stay in the conversation. i can do this but i don't enjoy it. it rushes my breathing and my thoughts, and quieter slower ppl get further crowded out
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it's especially frustrating if you've just met and don't know each other well and there isn't necessarily trust and social buy-in in the air to make relatively aggressive moves like pointing out, live, that someone's tempo is too high and it's crowding other ppl out
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i guess it's more tactful to just try to organically break up the conversation into smaller 2-4 person groups. a frustrating thing about online video calls is it's impossible to do this organically. irl you can just tilt your body slightly and pitch your voice a little different
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also naturally part of the reason why this gets me going is because i also used to be more of a fast-tempo person who wasn't tracking quieter slower people until i got a bunch of feedback about this 😅
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i learned recently that vr meetups actually work waay better than zoom for this! (bc at vibe camp told me about their vr meetup)
you can have dozens of ppl at a vr meetup together but it naturally breaks into small groups because you have body language and walking around
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& actually you don't even need vr, because (for example) you can get vrchat on steam *without* vr, just walking around with WASD+mouse on a laptop
turns out the important part isn't the "immersion" or hardware—it's just the spatial metaphor for conversations that makes it work
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