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.
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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Slightly unrelated but I feel like there has been such a proliferation of -verses from the Metaverse to the MCU that I’ve developed a negative association with all -verses as a marketing ploy despite my love for the Fediverse specifically. While probably not a realistic replacement, I think it’s fun when people sometimes use “the Federation” as it makes us sound like a network of allied planets engaged in intergalactic combat in a pulpy sci-fi series.
I agree, let's go full Star Trek and call it the "Federation of United Communities of Earth."
u want sum fuce?
I like that! I've called it the Federated sites before instead of the Fediverse.
Agreed! If we all just start calling it "the Federation", maybe it'll stick. Also, i hate that "Fediverse" makes me think of Kevin Federline.
"Fediverse, not Metaverse" sounds like it would be great on a T-shirt.
Would buy
"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 [email protected] 😁
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.
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.
EWWW
Not today, Satan.
I hope we can find a stable balance so that there will no longer be phases to the internet. I think federation is a move in the right direction for that purpose.
I think this fits the topic of free and open source software. those things are needed to end the cycle of venture capital and advertising destroying what should be public spaces.
You’re preaching to the choir.
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.
Yes, the Fediverse is actually awesome. It's decentralized, there's so many open-source implementations, etc etc. The Fediverse is what Zuckerberg wishes the Metaverse could be.
I respectfully disagree.
Zuck wants the metaverse to be what they show in the Ready Player One movie, which is not even close to what the fediverse is trying to be in any way.
He wants everyone to live in a virtual world that he alone controls.
I agree (also respectfully), just wanted to add, as I have seen the movie yesterday (and know the book), that the Oasis in Ready Player One is a not really a bad place. So the original OASIS is not what Meta want to have.
IOI (and Meta) want to transform an OASIS into their dystopian metaverse, like shown in the movie when IOI proudly presented their plans: a company's dream of monetarizing every breath you take while exploiting everyone except their shareholders.
There is an open source metaverse-like project called Third Room that is built on Matrix. I have not tested it too much, but still an interesting project
... and includes legs!
They said it couldn't be done!
Zuckerberg is sick and we should not pay attention to him.
Hey I remember that guy! Legless Mark from myspace.
Yes
Cool.
For starters the fediverse is real and it works, the metaverse is peering into Zuckerbergs asshole
The yawning chasm into the abyss
Fediverse and the internet in general is already the metaverse. All we need to make it look like in sci-fi is for majority of users to interact with it in a 3D virtual space instead of 2D. XR technologies will get us there eventually but content on those platforms is lacking at best and is very far from general adoption.
The next big hurdle is large corporations trying to "create" the metaverse, which already exists, and control it. Which basically disqualifies anything they are doing from ever being the metaverse. I actually felt some degree of rage when facebook renamed themselves to meta, they single-handedly ruined public perception of the concept, anyone talking about it now in the general public is not taken seriously.
What's also missing of the metaverse right now is owning your identity and taking it with you everywhere you go, fediverse comes close to that concept but is far from perfect since it's pretty hard to interact with other fediverse technologies right now, if I'm on lemmy I don't see any way to consume/interact with mastodon content or kbin content. However being able to traverse every instance of lemmy out there using one account, hosted on a server run by myself or someone else is a start.
I love and hate the idea of having a single ID on the internet, it’s interesting to think about.
I mean you'd be able to make as many as you want just that it would be compatible everywhere.
Yeah federated login would be a very interesting concept and I’m sure we will get there. The constant online profiling and fingerprinting always makes me paranoid. A single login following me to multiple sites is basically a more forward fingerprint. But I’m hoping for a federated internet where tracking will be kept at a minimal because there is less incentive too.
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.
i don't think we have anything to worry about, the metaverse is never going to be the next phase of the web. as someone who was enthusiastic about the whole vr boom at first & jumped to buy a quest, the vision zuck is pushing where everyone just has a quest 2/quest pro & uses it as a general computer or for social gatherings is unrealistic.
vr headsets are uncomfortable as hell to wear for more than a few minutes at a time, doing everything in the ui is clunky because you have to deal with vr virtual mice/keyboards, hand tracking is bad & so are the controllers, the people look low poly, low res & uncanny, the screens cause eyestrain & have weird lines/dots, i could go on & on about the numerous reasons why my quest has been in my closet since last year but you get the point.
imo we're simply not far enough technologically to create a good metaverse experience. even if we were, well, most people still aren't going to want to spend most their time in a headset staring that close at a screen
I think the "metaverse" is already dead. Zuckerberg tried to make it happen and it didn't, and Meta doesn't have the money to keep pumping into it. I think Meta will still produce the Quest headsets as a cheap alternative to the new Apple ones, but the idea of just hanging out in the metaverse is simply not going to happen.
I don't know whether the Fediverse will "happen" for the vast majority of people who aren't very tech savvy, but I'm enjoying it and it's replaced Reddit for me.
If anything is going to be the next big thing in tech though, it's AI. The fact that my 65+ year old parents know what ChatGPT is, and have used it, is unreal to me.
Meta is doing their best to make this vision come true, lol
Hey I just realized that there is a Fediverse community, if this is considered off topic I apologize I'd be happy to delete this. My bad.
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