I’m really thankful to hear your different viewpoints in a respectful manner.
Re: Minecraft. I realize that Minecraft is just an analogy and rather links is a better example of the “decentralized” nature of the metaverse. But I’ll definitely check out Cory’s talks about interop as I admittedly can learn a lot more there.
Have you checked out the free federated secondlife-like projects posted on the homepage in the past days? Do they fit your bill? I'll wait for the follow-up post :)
Since the introduction of BungeeCord in 2012 (and then Waterfall and Paracord), it has become increasingly popular to link together multiple servers to act as a gateway to different virtual worlds on different servers. Most of the top popular "servers" are in actuality multiple servers joined together, somewhat decentralized, though still centrally managed.
Even before Bungee, the reign of Bukkit (2010-2014) introduced a plugin API system allowing for managing multiple worlds. To this day the "Multiverse" plugin remains among the top plugins. The multiverse, not the metaverse, but a related concept.
It wouldn't be too far of a leap to link together unrelated Minecraft servers.
Regarding "you can certainly not expand the protocol -southerntofu" - the Minecraft protocol is commonly expanded by modders. In fact, it is specifically designed to be expanded, since the introduction of Plugin Channels in Minecraft 1.1: https://wiki.vg/Plugin_channels. Forge modders frequently enhance the protocol to support new functionality far beyond what was possible in the original game.
"new media forms and new mediums of access (web, mobile, PCs, AR, etc.)" vs "you can only run Minecraft where Microsoft distributes it (unless you crack/RE it)" - granted, but there are multiple unofficial efforts to develop new ways to access Minecraft servers, including through the web. My humble attempt at building such a client: https://github.com/voxel/voxelmetaverse
Not coincidentally, I called it "Voxel Metaverse", thinking along the same lines as you were, and had high aspirations. It did not pan out, though we had some cool features including connecting to Minecraft servers, embedding web page content in a 3D space (including interactivity with voxel-webview, still working in the demo: https://voxel.github.io/voxelmetaverse/) and I wrote a retrospective about its successes and failures earlier this year: https://medium.com/@deathcap1/6-years-after-6-months-of-voxe... but it showed a lot of promise in what could be done to build a decentralized distributed malleable virtual world. Voxels are particularly attractive in my opinion due to the ease of content creation.
Other more recent efforts to build web-based Minecraft clients include https://github.com/PrismarineJS/prismarine-web-client and https://www.spigotmc.org/resources/websandboxmc.39415/, both are currently quite limited, but its only a matter of time/effort to complete the implementation and not a fundamental technology limitation. There are dozens of unofficial Minecraft-compatible clients, in various degrees of completeness: https://wiki.vg/Client_List
Vivecraft started in 2013 to allow a VR experience in Minecraft, and there is now an official Minecraft VR port though Vivecraft still has its fans. There's official mobile and console clients (Bedrock Edition), and although not officially interoperable with PC servers, there are also 3rd party solutions to bridge the two, including Dragonet DragonProxy and GeyserMC.
Will Minecraft blaze the way forward into what becomes The Metaverse? Honestly, maybe not. Mojang may not see the same potential in Minecraft as I do, but I feel the modding community is onto something developing projects on the edges of a hypothetical Minecraft Metaverse. If it isn't Minecraft itself, I am convinced a similar game will play a fundamental role in the development of what we come to know as the metaverse.
Thanks for the correction. I was not aware this became a thing (last time i played minecraft was pre-1.0).
> multiple unofficial efforts to develop new ways to access Minecraft servers
Sure, but isn't that a bit sad you have to reverse-engineer a proprietary protocol for that? Making a client for Veloren or Minetest is arguably much easier in this regard. Still, as much as i hate client-side scripting on the web, i think a web client for minecraft is pretty cool :)
> Will Minecraft blaze the way forward into what becomes The Metaverse?
I don't know and honestly i don't really care. First because i don't see any actual problem that the metaverse is solving. Second because i once trusted mojang with my bucks because they were in alpha and needed money and said they considered open source everything later on but needed money first, and they betrayed our trust, just like any other soulless corp.
Now, not only is Minecraft not free software, but it's even owned by the devil itself (Microsoft). I really can't have any form of respect for people who derive all their wealth from modders working for free.
So you're saying THIS is our ONLY hope competing against Meta? After looking at the proposals, I really hope it isn't the only one. We need more.
Either way, the metaverse has multiple winners.
Not really. I'm saying VR is mostly a waste of resources, and that competing against big corp is useless because the system is rigged in their favor. We need to change the system, otherwise we're all doomed (see also End:Civ).
Specifically about online VR (what people call the metaverse for some reason that eludes me), i'm saying that Spritely Goblins is the only project i've read about that is not explicitly designed to abuse/exploit people. There may be others, but i'm not aware of them. Of course that doesn't mean that Spritely protocol can't be abused (like WWW), but it's to my knowledge the only protocol that fits the author's vision of what the metaverse should be (federated and extensible).
Because that is what Neal Stephenson called it in _Snow Crash_, which, though perhaps not the very first, was at least the first widely-popularized description of such a system. I recommend reading the book and comparing it to what we actually have. What we actually have comes up pretty short.
What made Stephenson's Metaverse different was that it was the kind of place where (e.g.) high schoolers would go on dates. Gibson's cyberspace was dark, dark, dark.
AFAICR: Hackers, the corporations they prey on, and the employees and consultants employed by the corporations.
One would think, also the clients paying the corporations for the stuff the employees/consultants produce, but I honestly can't recall; they probably featured very little in the plot, and it's been if not over then very close to thirty years since I read it.
the internet is interoperability. and commercial attempts to defeat it are weakening the infrastructure as well as the technical culture required to evolve it.
the community gave the world a truly marvelous thing, and not only did they use it primarily to sell trash, they took the keys too.
The author claims Minecraft is an interoperable protocol, which is false: you can only run Minecraft where Microsoft distributes it (unless you crack/RE it) and you can certainly not expand the protocol. Minecraft is a very good example of vendor lock-in restricting user freedom.
> FaceTime has taken a huge step forward in connecting people
How so? What did it invent? Everything we do on computers today has been there since at least 1968's "Mother of all demos". If anything, FaceTime and iMessage and such have restricted people connections. We had standard protocols for IM (IRC/XMPP) and they deliberately broke away from the federation so that they could capture and control users.
> This is not a winner-take-all, zero-sum environment. Video, text, images and other forms of media will not die as a result
They may not die, but there's concerns to be raised. About accessibility first and foremost: text may not be accessible to blind people, but screen readers and braille screens make it so. Audio/Video can use transcripts and captions to be accessible. What about VR? Does VR care for disabilities?
If VR tech becomes successful, there will be huge incentives for the usual evil corps to move everything there to appear modern and to better control our attention span. More immersion means more addiction, means more exposure to advertisement and more susceptibility to various "mind control" techniques.
> But the metaverse actually (theoretically) allows for more fairness due to the decentralized nature of it.
How is it decentralized? You make this argument over and over again yet all corporations pushing for the metaverse have never promoted a decentralized standard so far.
> YouTube and TikTok have enabled people from unprivileged backgrounds to make money from providing value
That's true for some people, but that's the exception and not the norm. Most people who make money don't make interesting content (just sponsored shit), and most people who make interesting content will be censored due to alleged copyright violation of ToS abuse. Youtube and Tiktok are two very good examples of everything that's wrong with the Internet as we know it. You may or may not agree with Youtube's political censorship, but you will certainly agree that TikTok's censorship is going really far. [0]
> My conclusion and refutation of this point is that cross-compatibility is not bullshit. (...) We still text today, but we still video call too!
The word you're looking for may be interoperability. And interoperability goes against the laws of capitalism. People use many different protocols and most are centralized proprietary protocols we have zero control over. I really recommend you check out Cory Doctorow's talks on interop and monopolies.
> So yes, progress is a good thing, first of all.
Depends how you measure progress. Is it financial? Scientific? Based on happiness? Equal access to resources? According to most metrics (except economic development) humanity has been going backwards for decades, destroying everything it touches.
> technophobia and pessimism of technology
I'm neither technophobic nor a pessimist. I'm a realist: i know humanity is capable of the best and the worst depending on the circumstances and incentives. There's a lot that's deeply broken about our society as it is, and i see the "metaverse" being pushed by the most evil actors out there. It cannot be for the betterment of humankind because the incentives are wrong to start with.
If you're looking for a metaverse project that's not a complete dystopian nightmare, it appears Spritely Goblins [1] is the only one worth considering, because it aims to be federated and standardized, and based on capabilities.
[0] https://www.protocol.com/china/i-built-bytedance-censorship-... [1] https://gitlab.com/spritely/goblins