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>Rule #2: The Metaverse is for everyone.

>Rule #3: Nobody controls the Metaverse.

I'm no expert and to be honest, a bit like I was with the internet back in the day, don't see the point but if those two rules aren't adhered to then the "metaverse" is dead on its feet.

I feel the internet had an advantage in that at the start there was no Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc, either around or interested in it. If these companies get in at the start of this thing their wall gardens will kill the metaverse just like they're current effort to create wall gardens on the internet are chipping away at what made the internet what it is today.

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Those are not rules. Those are fantasies. As long as humans are implementing all this, struggles to control it are going to be a thing, and the very people most likely to abuse the situation will be the people who wrest control of it from others.

In some ways this isn't a new problem, though. The challenge here is defining a collective good and valuing it over individual power, and that might not be a wholly solveable problem but it's certainly a negotiation that takes place as long as there is not only one power that exists.

In that way, these rules (fantasies as they are) become valid. They're not laws as in 'gravity', they're laws as in 'enforceable and societally agreed upon'. I'm a bit puzzled how you enforce 'nobody controls the Metaverse' but it is quite a stake in the ground: you can sure tell when it's NOT being honored.

They are not fantasies. They're one set of potential outcomes.

The fundamental laws that determine whether decentralization or centralization dominates is the rate of accessible content creation.

If a centralized organization (AOL & Yahoo, early and late 90s respectively) can create more content than the Internet (decentralized, early/mid 90s), then the former dominates.

If the greater number of content developers afforded by a decentralized system can create more content (Internet, late 90s - 10s), then it dominates.

Attempting to co-opt both strengths via platforms (Google & Facebook, 10s - now) is a newer phenomenon, but fundamentally still has the same tension.

If anyone wants decentralized metaverse to prevail, work on open dev tooling, content creation tools, and client standards. Not because they'll shift the balance, but because with them creators will shift the balance.

I've lived through this with aframe.io and as part of the original WebVR team. It was one of the top frameworks with a large community, but content creators at a nascent stage can't shift the balance without control of the browsers or spec

Can you elaborate? You mean Content creators need control of the browser (development) ?

Some control over the direction of the spec to avoid situations like taking years to rewrite a working shipped spec, removing controller support, removing haptics, adding unneeded APIs, focusing on Cardboard and 3DOF, removing or not supporting link traversal, fuzzing headset tracking data. Or to be able to get useful features such as access to the headset camera or a way to bind textures without giant framedrops

If there was to be a "standardized/decentralized" "metaverse", things would have to move much faster. Think of all the features a "metaverse" might want, and each item would have to go through spec gatekeepers that don't even use/develop VR

Yeah that seems like a problem. In the early days of computing, you had consortiums competing against eachother. That might be helpful in speeding things up.

I wonder if it is possible to build a Verse on something like Godot, which is open already and has VR tools.

You can build verses with anything, but something standardized and decentralized like the Web? Competition back then may have been possible, but it's daunting now when you have winner-takes-all corporations with Google and the Web, and Mark Zuckerberg with VR.

You could do it with Godot, but distribution is also important. I built a VR browser before that browsed standardized VR worlds, but control of hardware also felt important. Perhaps there was a long-term path to success there.

Exactly.

Let's say we lived in a time where the internet didn't exist but we somehow knew its potential could lead to what it has today. You better believe that someone commercially minded (think AT&T) would be sitting on DARPA's shoulders to make sure they captured all of the value.

Peter Thiel's obsession with naturalistic monopolies is no coincidence.

That may be it. The internet was not a business project ( attempts were made before Darpa, but those failed ), but rather some technically-minded people trying to make it work. Metaverse, if such thing is to come forth, should be in the same category.

But it won't.

Internet was already too much of a proof that we are not ready for it as a species. I am not just talking about powers-that-be getting riled up over how it took some of the power away. I am talking about how it laid bare how downright awful average human can be.

But I hear metaverse and I chuckle, because the best comparison for it for me is Fed-issued crypto coin. Completely misses the point, but it runs on blockchain. Yay.

Well yeah, but walled gardens are there, right? On mobile phones which appeared after google and facebook. No one cared that their rights got taken away, they just want new shiny toy. VR has all the 'wow' effect to be that toy.

Never will buy any of facebook's shit but I damn well did invest in their stock cuz it's evident that no one sees the problem with selling their souls away be it in the browser or in virtual reality (where there's even more opportunity to influence you).

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