Metabook
metabook.fyi
metabook.fyi
I assume this will be an unusual opinion, but I'm actually very excited about Metaverse. I probably would not have chosen Facebook as the stewards of the first big VR-world, but I've been waiting a long time for some big co to make an investment in this direction. I think a (little m) metaverse is the obvious evolution for VR and could become ubiquitous.
I left Facebook about 3 years ago, around Cambridge Analytica time. It's bee annoying - very hard to plan events, chat with family, etc. - but I've felt strongly enough that the privacy cost wasn't worth the value.
When I heard about Facebook leaning hard into Metaverse, I immediately ordered an Oculus and signed up for a Facebook account (which is required to use Oculus). The value of being early in potentially the first big metaverse is well worth the privacy cost.
Surprisingly, as soon as I created my account, the account was locked for "not following community standards". I hadn't even seen the feed yet, and I was banned! I appealed the ban, and no dice - now it's permanent.
So now I am permanently locked out of Metaverse, presumably for the crime of not being a long-standing Facebook fan. When I imagine a world where a metaverse is a core piece of society, this sort of corporate gatekeeping is _exactly_ the thing I'd worry about.
sounds like a thing programmers believe about names: that you can tell when one is fictional or real.
Very easy to tell that your “real” name does not match your CC or your home address.
2. CC and address are the tip of the iceberg of data that FB has. The content of all messages you send on Messenger or IG (including any time your name was used), data from a bunch of other apps on your phone including IP, your other usernames, your photos and files, locations you travel to, etc. Possibly voice to text stored of anything you’ve ever said while in the Oculus and almost definitely anything you’ve ever said to anyone else through the Oculus, the way you walk, and a hundred other data points that are slurped up in real time any chance they get.
3. There’s almost no option to get your stuff back if banned. The longer you use a Quest the riskier this gets. Every dollar spent on games? Gone. Friend list? Gone. Friends? Gone if you never got external contact info.
It’s easy to pretend you can get lost in the crowd and get away with it, and for some people maybe that’s true, but the data they have on you grows by the day...
Don't you know other retailers?
You make it sound as if Facebook will actually be the stewards of the first big VR-world, but all they did was announce something to divert attention from a serious scandal. They might as well have announced that they'll work on colonising Mars, and you'd be sad for missing your opportunity to get prime real-estate on Amazonis Planitia. Facebook are not building a metaverse; they're selling ads and trying to avoid regulation.
While that statement may be true, its significance isn't as much as one may think. Remember the Blackberry? They owned the smartphone market - back when the market was extremely tiny and was primarily comprised of business executives. What made smartphones go mainstream? The iPhone.
The same may be true for VR headsets. Is the Oculus the most popular VR headset? I'll take your word that it is. However, I only know a handful of people who have a VR headset at all, and they're all über geeks. Like the Blackberry, the market is comprised of a non-representative sample of the population. Should VR headsets go mainstream it probably won't be the Oculus doing it - otherwise it probably already would have.
Will Metaverse make VR mainstream? I doubt it. The public doesn't simply trust Facebook enough for that and the public hasn't been very receptive to VR. I don't see the metaverse going anywhere.
Facebook did announce something very vague, didn't show any tech or proof of concept and for the most part it was just "tech visionairy" babble with some buzzwords sprinkled on top. What makes anyone think Facebook has the ability to create even a decent basic game/3D experience? A very basic decent VR experience? Let alone some kind of VR world encompassing MMO?
Companies with the most experience and specialized talent in the world in those sectors fail very regularly at the attempts to just create basic decent 3D experiences that don't feel like complete jank. And we have also seen the silicon valley arrogance of non gaming companies with a "It's just <anything related to gaming or 3D> how hard can it be?" attitude fall on their noses plenty of times.
The whole "metaverse" announcement gives me the vibes of a mix between Ouya (all the empty PR babble) and Star Citizen (overpromising way too much).
> all they did was announce something to divert from a serious scandal
This is what it boils down to.
Now, I could sing the praises of Second Life (and parallel efforts like Open Simulation) for a long time, but it would be unfair of me not to mention that it is not officially a VR experience. All VR access to "The Grid", as they call it, is done through third party "Viewers" (effectively a web browser for the metaverse) based on the now open source code for the official Linden Viewer. That said, there has been serious efforts made into making a VR Viewer for The Grid, and I expect such efforts will only be enboldened by the new direction Facebook/Meta is taking.
The thing Facebook brings, regardless of what you think of their technical prowess, is a network. I don't know yet how they'll get devices on people's faces, but if Facebook has anything it's access to a massive userbase. That's arguably more important than any tech.
It's up to the society to make sure that doesn't happen. If we fail to ensure that, we get what we deserve. It's not like we don't have the advance warning. We just need to listen to it.
Furthermore I think the "metaberg is a nefarious spy" messaging should be separated from the "living in VR is toxic even in concept" messaging, because I believe the former but explicitly not the latter, and I want to be able to be critical about the implementation of this while still being excited about the concept (and hoping it can be implemented humanely on top of open protocols)
Why can't you criticize something based on leadership's ongoing behavior until after the project is done? That doesn't make any sense.
Not if the point of the criticism is "this should not be built by this company". It doesn't matter if the first version looks innocuous, if you can't trust that the next version will be.
More to the point, something this important shouldn't be built by any one or two or three companies, no matter who they are.
Facebook has already put out positive messaging around what they're building. Is your point that positive messaging, promises, etc. are acceptable to be made but not criticism? That sounds like it'd unfairly skew the conversation to me.
If Facebook had to similarly "stay quiet" until they launched, then sure that's fair. But if your point is that Zuccerberg should be able to talk about how the Metaverse will redefine our connections and usher in a new digital life without criticism, then I strongly disagree.
Is it part of the joke that this page is empty without JS and contains dozens of fingerprinted resources, many of them from Facebook's CDN?
Edit: BTW, mbasic.facebook.com is one of the most accessible and compatible sites out of all the big leagues.
Right! No body is forcing you. Ironically, these kinds of anxious reactions are symptoms of the very same pathological gregariousness that is the problem with social media in the first place.
Kind of. Workplaces, schools, academic environments definitely force the usage of some tool over another, or spending more or less time on screens. I am thankful that my new university uses BigBlueButton and hybrid teaching, since I spent the past two years on Microsoft Teams.
But who's to blame?
I have the feeling that people are blaming the wrong people. Corporations are amoral entities whose mission is to maximize profit. If this doesn't bring social value or has obvious negative externalities, we should blame the politicians who set the rules, and vote for someone else.
But I don't feel like people are beholden to anyone. But again, that's purely anecdotal. People who are unaware and/or indifferent are more at risk.
Nice.
“Pathological gregariousness…” with the scale and degree of consumption of social media, don’t you think there’s a possibility that actually there’s a universal human desire to connect with one another and it’s the tools themselves that are exploiting it to a pathological degree?
This metaverse BS aims to be an even more contained aggregation of all this. If you watch the presentation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9vWShsmE20), its meant to include all aspects of one's life.
Talk about lock in!
Ironically, these kinds of anxious reactions are symptoms of the very same pathological gregariousness that is the problem with hackernews in the first place.
- the least innovative,
- has the worst corporate governance,
- purest advertising company,
- The CEO is not good but has dominant share of votes.
Facebook is relevant only because they spend their way out of trouble and buy competition. The US and EU regulators are going to remove that tactics. Good luck getting EU approval for any new Whatsapp, Instagram acquisition.
There is no clear avenue for them to stop doing the negative things they do, but they are not even trying. They just treat it as PR problem.
According to what? FB has had a tremendous growth.
If a company wants to be international, they must do what regulators in their main markets say.
While I'm not a Facebook fan, there are some counterpoints:
- they have singlehandedly saved the VR industry by going all in on cordless / standalone VR which has increased the accessible market by at least an order of magnitude.
- almost the entire world are using React and Pytorch as de facto standards / defaults now
I don't know how you would measure these against outputs from other tech companies but it is clear to me that a bunch of innovation is happening inside Facebook (whether you like it or not of course is another thing).
Second is not their business innovation. It's open source. They do also good research.
This would be a more convincing pitch if it didn't end with "now just use different centralized services that nobody uses".
We need protocols, not platform capitalism. We need easy self-hosting, not reliance on third-party middle men and rent-seekers.
I should be able to click an app on my computer and have my own web page running in seconds, that anyone can find and follow.
The fact we don't is how platforms like Facebook are able to dominate, and the even worse fact is this was deliberate.
There's literally thousands if not tens of thousands of hosting providers and software packages that offer just that. I can get some hosting with DirectAdmin to install e.g. Wordpress on it within minutes. Following is through RSS feeds. Finding is down to Google, which in turn is down to you, the author, writing good stuff.
But most of them are incredibly confusing and off-putting to the majority of people FB attracts. Most contemporary net citizens don't have a functional mental client-server model such that they would even know they need a thing called hosting, let alone choose a service. And there's no tools that integrate a content feed, personal publishing, threaded comment and events/calenders in a coherent, secure, easy to use way. Most people barely understand that some code runs "in" their browser and some "on a server", or the relationship between the two. It can't be taught in a few minutes (it takes most of us here years to grok the subtleties and there's infinite edge cases).
To really get the whole FB experience, we also need "group-ware" (shared photos, tagging, shared calendar, private chat) with single-click installation, configuration and built-in templated branding.
You're right that all these tools exist, but they're fragmented and take time and knowledge to understand, use and integrate. And most of them are not interoperable.
> Following is through RSS feeds.
RSS is great in principle but all the tools that consume it suck: comment RSS feeds are treated at the same level as content, rather than "of" the content they refer to; most site still use RSS rather than ATOM, so you only get a summary of content; most readers keep you in-app rather than linking to full browsers, so you're trapped in webviews and inflexible, under-featured tools.
Yes, it's all "out there" but none of it matches the speed and comfort of FB.
(coming from someone who no longer has an FB account)
Beyond the barrier of technical knowledge, there's also a barrier of access: many people simply do not have internet access that allows true static hosting. Even setting aside the historical issue of IPv4 address limitations, there's things like ISP port blocking, packet filtering and snooping, rate-limiting of upload, etc., that exist specifically to prop up rent-seeking hosting companies and "business plans" that charge ten times the money for the same exact advertised service just with the blocks turned off.
My theoretical app basically can't exist anymore without a lot of awkward hacks. Windows actually still has web hosting features built-in, but I can't use them outside the local network because my ISP blocks the port for HTTP (as well as a ton of other protocols), and dynamic IP means I can't link it to a domain anyway without third-party tools like DynDNS. Instead I'd have to rely on tunneling services like localhost.run, or peer-to-peer protocols that piggy-back in clever ways on existing open ports, or else pony up for a business account and pay more money for, often, less bandwidth than I have now.
The majority of internet users don't have a computer
Pixelfed is part of the ActivityPub Fediverse, as is https://write.as (a https://writefreely.org instance). These are protocols.
About metaverse i often see people here talk about vrc (vrchat) here but there also some open-source like the fork of High Fidelity (Vircadia) that who are more near of what facebook is doing. But there is not much community on it last time i checked, i need to check it again tho. Today iv stop and move around NeosVR who is already proposing many thing that facebook whant to do and yes i know its not open source.
Also i didnt do much research on open-source VR alternative so if you know some more i will happy to know them.
* First everyone ignores Meta Inc.
* Then everyone laughs at Meta Inc. <==== We are here.
* Then everyone fights Meta Inc.
* Then Meta Inc. wins (again)
EDIT: found it on YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOn2CZWnxxY