One thing I found helpful was some chill time in virtual rooms periodically. For those who opted in it seemed to work well. For folks who are all business all the time it was fine to opt out.

IME different life seasons can bring different preferences. With a young family and project house I don't want to socialize as much with coworkers as I did when I was a single 20 something.

The problems with virtual rooms is that you can't have small breakout conversations naturally. In-person I can walk around a space and talk to small groups of people. On a virtual conference call, if I'm speaking everyone has to listen to me, which makes speaking for some people even harder.

There was a "meeting" startup on HN last year (several years ago?) that had such a product. Each "room" had multiple tables, which you were free to move between. You could sorta hear people at the other tables; the closer the table was, the easier you could hear the people at it. There was also a "stage" feature that allowed someone to address the whole room at once.

It seemed like a pretty good experiment, but I don't think it caught on. Maybe Slack (or Teams) should aquihire them and implement something similar.

gather.town? We used it for a few virtual meetups where I'm based.

Among us with proximity chat as a work conference call?

I was wanting to do that for my birthday last year, but I know too many people who don't own laptops

In my case I setup a Mumble server which allows break out rooms

Exactly right. It’s extremely dehumanizing, ultimately making a tool of a human, and that will probably make it easier for people to exploit others.