I’d much rather see sites like Lemmy, PeerTube, and Mastodon see widespread adoption then the dystopian cyberpunk fever dream in the head of Zuckerburg. Did you not read the novel dude? It’s a freaking warning! That’s like Jeff Bezos reading Fahrenheit 451 and going “holy crap dude, gotta make that a reality like, yesterday!” I want the Fediverse, not the Metaverse! Thank you for coming to my TedTalk.
“Metaverse” is mostly dead, anyway. It’s basically turned into VR Bitcoin, and a worse version of the already existing VR.
A.I. seems to be the new shiny thing investors are moving into, and I’d be surprised if Facebook didn’t just silently remove references to the metaverse eventually.
Fediverse, for the slightly cringey “verse” name, does seem to at least be trying something new. Federating multiple completely different sites like Mastodon, Kbin, or Lemmy isn’t really something that was done before (that I can remember, feel free to correct if I’m wrong). You had some integrations with things like RSS and APIs before, but you couldn’t just go on Twitter and post/reply/read a Reddit thread from within twitter, or you’d have to do it with a complicated network of bots.
In my opinion, Fediverse is just a very fancy email service. My Fediverse ID is xavier666@lemm.ee 😁
It’s a good analogy - in the days before email, all you had was a username @ your BBS (Bulletin Board Server). You dialed into your local BBS’s landlines with a modem - they usually had 2-4 numbers available, so that gives you an idea of scale. The BBS systems were federated so user@bbs1 could see and respond to the same threads as user@bbs2. It was nice - it worked pretty much like the fediverse actually - and the tone was similar.
The messaging systems on the BBS communities evolved into email and Usenet before big money came along and fucked everything up.
The metaverse is silicon valley’s attempt to force mass adoption from the top down but tech has never worked like that. Mass adoption comes from the bottom up and selling a worthwhile product that makes peoples lives better. their only product is an aesthetic with a very limited niche at best.
“Fediverse, not Metaverse” sounds like it would be great on a T-shirt.
Would buy
Well the fediverse works. The fediverse is what internet was meant to be, before corporations sized it and made it the nightmare that centralised social media is. The “metaverse” is just Zuckerberg’s desperation to maintain his decadent model of social media afloat.
I think that there was just too much negative association between Facebook’s tomfuckery for the last 20 years and the Metaverse. There was no way to divorce the two. Young people didn’t want to use it because Facebook is cringe, and old people didn’t know how, or couldn’t give two shits to learn how, to use it.
That and the Metaverse is using tech that was dated in the early 2000s. There were multiplayer online browser games that I played on as a kid that had better quality than the Metaverse. VRchat is 8 years old and is better in basically every way, and it’s VRCHAT.
Long story short, they screwed it from the start by being the ones that made it. It might have worked if it weren’t for the company making it.
Edit: Does anyone remember the fashion show they tried to put on in the Metaverse, where they sold crappy dresses for the game for like hundreds of dollars or something? Metaverse was designed to be a blatant and lazy cash grab, and that’s why it turned into such an unmitigated cash sink.
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You’re preaching to the choir.
What’s funny about the “metaverse” is that by the definition from Snow Crash, the internet as we know it is already a metaverse: a bunch of distinct digital spaces which users are free to “travel” between, and the system as a whole isn’t owned by any one group. Conversely, Meta’s idea of the metaverse is, by definition, not a metaverse because it’d be owned by them as a platform.
Dude, I never thought of that! And some users have already pointed out that the metaverse idea is already dead and Zuck’s company is in shambles. This is a weird time for social media isn’t it? Facebook’s company is slowly dying, Tik-Tok is getting banned (or at least in the process of it) Elon killed Twitter, and the u/spez is murdering Reddit. This is the perfect time for the Fediverse isn’t it?
It’s either this or we go outside, but the sun is out there. And people.
