As a mobile dev (and former Second Life player), I am skeptical about the metaverse due to limitations of current mobile hardware. Using the metaverse is going to require the screen to always be on and will consume the CPU which leads to a huge battery suck. We already saw this play out with Pokemon Go leading to lots of players to carry around external battery packs.

Unless mobile technology has some major revolution with battery life or Facebook/Meta can find a way to use the metaverse without a screen or sucking battery life, I think mobile tech will severely hinder users from using the metaverse.

Now to bring things back to the original quesion, when Second Life was a thing, mobile tech was mostly flip phones and Blackberries so mobile wasn't an option. Users could only use the desktop and were fine with it because it is all we knew at the time. Being a desktop only application was never an issue for the users. The current demand to support multiple platforms when many of those platforms are not capable of supporting the metaverse is what makes the current metaverse different than Second Life.