Is the future of the internet in the metaverse?

[Dreamwings]

I wrote this perfect response and then as soon as I hit send the forums closed for Monday and now I have to remember everything I wrote AAAHHHHH

Off topic; but I'm halfway through this video and I already have about 10 years worth of ideas for things to add to this forum Thank you for the link!!

Yeah no problem xD! Ozwomp dress up game?? 

Soooo there is a different kind of data transfer that I didn't mention in my post; and that is socially agreed data tranfer! A really good example of this is 88x31 buttons in the web revival! There is no fixed rule or code that enforces the creation and properties of these buttons; they are an idea that is socially enforced and maintained because they make linking easier, are easy to understand and personalize, and they provide social cohesion for web revival sites.

There is no reason why a metaverse could not start as a series of social agreements between virtual world crafters; eventually snippets of code would evolve to smooth those social agreements, and eventually still those snippets of code could evolve into or inform a protocol for metaverse worlds. I think that natural evolution could be one path to solving the very complex issues as you say!

I didn't think of that. That is a pretty good idea actually. A single, sharable file format able to be interconnected. Off the top of myhead, and I know this is a really weird one, but I'm picturing something like the .package file that the Sims series uses for custom content. They aren't interoperable between games, but they do contain different sorts of information. A .package could just recolor an existing dress in the game, add a new item, or completely change the entire game as a whole, though usually the latter requires more than just a single .package. Now, I'm not saying it has to be that complicated (as you said, could be as simple as a specific size of image file), but it is sort of similar to those agreed upon standards that you mentioned (though said standards are enfoced by the game itself). Plus one file to rule them all. Though it doesn't nessicerily have to be that way. As evidenced by Gemini, Gemspace, and the offshoot projects from it, there are a lot of ways to do the same idea but improved upon it and you can have as many or as few as you want, it all depends on how many developers are interested in doing it and how skilled they are.
Not sure how good I would be at making said standards because I am not THAT smart to pull something like that off, but I would be interested if someone else did somehow (I love stupid niche gimmick technologies like that. I mean, maybe it IS going to be the future but when it starts out it's not, like how the internet was before it became basically a standard of living like today.).

It seems like, judging from your responses, you've thought about this a lot, you've sort-of dabbled in metaverse-likes like the Everyone-site and Minecraft (which you mentioned as an example), and I know you mentioned you wanted to encourage other people to make their ideal metaverses and such but I am curious, have you yourself been planning a metaverse? A Melonverse, if you will?
Also, on the topic of Minecraft, between the time you mentioned it and now when I can write this, more footage and coverage of Chinese Minecraft has been releasing to the West from beyond the firewall and it is sort of like the idea of the metaverse as well. Its a lot more restrictive and pretty gaudy, but there are friends lists, a universal currency shared between all servers (though some servers also have their own smaller currencies), cosmetics and mods made by other dealers and sold (Some of which, like the mods, are stolen from beyond the firewall without the developers permission but yknow), servers are made by people and corperations, cosmetics can be carried between servers, they all have to be approved by NetEase (who run Chinese Minecraft), it's super restrictive (though not as restrictive as the Bedrock edition store over here), heavily censored, and it really only works due to the way the country functions, but it is sort of an idea of that thing working. Again, rather gaudy to the point it's not really Minecraft anymore but interesting.

[Chandelier]

Another attempt on creating "SecondLife 2.0", mostly the economy part.

Sorry for being a bit blunt, I do like the concept of metaverse myself, specially the user experience part of going around the web with enviroments instead of web pages. However what irks in the back of my head where the constant agressive monitazition schemes, that can lead to things like Decentraland's landlordism (where the ones that bought most land had more power and mostly turned their lands into walled casinos, to simulate scarcity).

I want something close to VRChat, even with its flaws its the best example we have of a metaverse of sorts.

[Dreamwings]

Another attempt on creating "SecondLife 2.0", mostly the economy part.

Sorry for being a bit blunt, I do like the concept of metaverse myself, specially the user experience part of going around the web with enviroments instead of web pages. However what irks in the back of my head where the constant agressive monitazition schemes, that can lead to things like Decentraland's landlordism (where the ones that bought most land had more power and mostly turned their lands into walled casinos, to simulate scarcity).

I want something close to VRChat, even with its flaws its the best example we have of a metaverse of sorts.

I agree with this.
I have wanted to get into Second Life but it is very, very hard to dip your toes into it as a F2P player (and for me at least, if the F2P experience isn't eyecatching, the P2P experience isn't worth it. I only pay for things I know are going to be worth it.). For example, with the landlord system as you mentioned. To buy a large, decently sized landmass to do whatever you want with, it costs way more than what your average person could provide. This is for two reasons. 1. This is the only way that Linden Labs can really make money for such a high cost game like Second Life and 2. You aren't SUPPOSED to buy land upfront like that. You're supposed to buy it from other people, like how it currently is, as irl rich people own most of the land in the world and can then divvy it up into smaller chunks for you to buy for still extortionate amounts, just small enough that you could at least PAY it rather than holding it out of reach. Then said people cash out, buy more land with that cashed out money, meaning even more poeple have to go through them if they want to make an area in the game, and on and on and on. Of course, I know you and some other people know about that system but I am also kind of explaining it not only as set-dressing but for the people in the back who have never played or looked into Second Life
Now, me personally, I like making things. And the appeal of something like Second Life would not only be to make my own pretty models and such for my player character and then getting to sell them to other people but also create my own worlds and such. And it is very hard to do that with such a high barrier to entry. And then maybe the idea is that isn't the purpose to begin with, hence why many of the more artistic-yet-poorer folk end up teaming up with people who already do own land to rep their wares, but it is a rather.... strange atmosphere, yknow. I wouldn't say nessicerily that innovation is stifled due to it but it definitely... is abit stagnant? A lot fo the audience that is there currently are the same audience from back when it was popular or are into it for the other stuff and due to the high barrier (plus the lack of advertising in the modern day) it does sort of drive away people who would have said newer ideas for things due to the audience mostly desiring to stay the same. Why join a far more dated, inaccessible, and P2P game when other games like VRC and even Roblox to an extend have the same offerings and are far more open with a lower barrier to entry.
That all being said, I dont nessicerily think the idea of the virtual land is inheritly a bad thing, just moreso that the way it is done in Second Life leads to things only being controlled by wealthy irl people (or in the case of the early cryto games, people who got in early and bought it all). I feel like maybe a system like what we have here on the internet as a whole would be better suited. Where yes, you could pay for it from someone else if you don't know anything about hosting, or you could be lucky and find someone who gives it out for free (with restrictions like Neocities and Nekoweb), orrrr you could do it yourself, in your own house, and it only costs as much as your internet does (aka, self hosting). But again, yknow, Second Life has it the way it does for a reason. Like I said at the beginning, they dont really make any money any other way as they dont take any cuts on transactions iirc on the marketplace (the more popular one) or the payouts, which something like Roblox does do (they take pretty massive cuts, actually).
And on top of that, I do feel that VRChat is a bit unsustainable in the long run with how it works. I stopped playing around the time VRChat+ was introducted (not because of it but because I got busy with life and then I couldnt come back to it because Facebook locked up my Oculus Quest unless I made a Facebook account and I was NOT going to make a Facebook account to use my headset, so I've just been passively trying to save up for a Valve Index instead but that has been taking ages because yknow... $1K headset and I keep buying adoptables, other video games, and expensive figures), so this might be a bit dated and I know that VRC+ was introduced to stave off thwese costs, but something AS popular as VRC, running without ads, infinite uploads of avatars and worlds? That's a bit ridiculous. The only reason they've lasted as long as they have is investors to be honest and investors will pull out eventually and lead to heavier monatiization (though maybe that has already happened at this pont). Unfortunantly, we live in a world that requires money so something like VRC, while also close to said idea (3D, VR, and all) can't exactly last without a money maker. And judging by the reaction when it first came out back in the day, though of course that sentiment could have changed by now, I don't think that people like VRC+ enough for that.

[Phoenix]

I dont know about the metaverse perse. As a vr user myself, I couldn't stand using it for long periods of time and I doubt even technological improvements could help that a whole lot.

I think AI is more of the future of the internet tbh

[Kallistero]

That's why I did my dissertation on metaverses

I've just read your dissertation, and I tell you, it got my wheels turning a lot on where "metaverse" as a concept has been and where it is. It inspired a lot of thoughts that I won't into depth on in this post, because there's a conclusion I drew from your work that I want to focus on first. To start, here are a few metaversal examples that I haven't seen brought up yet:

• I see a lot of Minecraft being brought up, but if you're familiar with the Minecraft Classic days, back when Java applets were a thing, players could host their own Minecraft Classic servers and have them populate onto a list that was on the Minecraft website, available for people to join for free while Minecraft Beta was the premium product. That already made it a "Puddle World" metaverse, but people would make Minecraft Classic multiplayer plugins that, if I recall, brought it even further. One of the multiplayer plugins allowed you to interact with in-game elements that would change the URL of the page to bring you to another Minecraft Classic server, effectively inducting that Minecraft Classic world into a headless puddle-world metaverse that had almost the entire backend load handled by the players running the servers instead of the central owner of the product!
• You brought up "shallow" and "deep" metaverses as a delineation between digital worlds that share assets & ones that do not, and Terraria is a game that does allow you to switch between worlds on the same character with all the same possessions. It's just whatever's on the character at the time that gets carried over. This is run with effectively even less centralization than Minecraft Classic, since server switching is done essentially the same way modern Minecraft does it, but it just has that added "depth" of taking your avatar & items between worlds.
• Animal Crossing! Especially Wild World on the DS where you could just connect to someone else who was in proximity to you. This effective metaverse feature wasn't an essential part of the gameplay, but it probably is some of the highest metaversal depth of any metaverse that was entirely run off of the players' hardware.

You sort of see where my focus is here. These examples echo your point that a big company isn't needed to manage a metaverse just for it to exist. As you pointed out in your dissertation, the Internet is the biggest metaverse (and probably canonically "The Metaverse" right now), and that isn't owned by any one entity!

Soooo there is a different kind of data transfer that I didn't mention in my post; and that is socially agreed data tranfer! A really good example of this is 88x31 buttons in the web revival! There is no fixed rule or code that enforces the creation and properties of these buttons; they are an idea that is socially enforced and maintained because they make linking easier, are easy to understand and personalize, and they provide social cohesion for web revival sites.

There is no reason why a metaverse could not start as a series of social agreements between virtual world crafters; eventually snippets of code would evolve to smooth those social agreements, and eventually still those snippets of code could evolve into or inform a protocol for metaverse worlds. I think that natural evolution could be one path to solving the very complex issues as you say!

While I was reading the thread, I was going to say something like this. That's already how the Internet works as a metaverse, that the mode of communication is socially agreed upon by all the users & hosts, and other metaverses can be created off of that same basic model. You beat me to the punch on that one, but I also made a little example! I noodled out a script on my Everyone page that allows you to change your cursor by putting an image URL in a custom URL parameter for the page, and any other pages with the same script will carry that same custom cursor over, too. So, if you change your cursor through the blue instructions on the page, then click the star on the left to go to the homepage, the custom cursor follows you there, too! If there was a back-end live feed to display other people's cursors with the cursor-image-url information included, the Everyone site could become a simple metaverse with totally custom & offsite-hosted player assets! 

From your dissertation, you mentioned the potential of MelonEngine as a way of running a metaverse. I'm imagining that if multiple MelonEngine Web applications were made to retrieve player model data from a URL parameter or request body supplied through the browser, it would be able to become a multi-application experience that leverages the same player model across worlds, without the application itself needing the model onboard. This could be expanded to include other game assets. The proof of concept for independent metaverses may have been right on the tip of the tongue for a while now. Correct me if I'm wrong about this, but I think you might have all the pieces.