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.

You’re preaching to the choir.

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.

“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.

“Fediverse, not Metaverse” sounds like it would be great on a T-shirt.

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.

Yes

We, the global media company, are proud to announce we have finally created the brainfuckinator from award winning sci-fi novel “don’t build the brainfuckinator”

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.

Zuckerberg is sick and we should not pay attention to him.

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.

For starters the fediverse is real and it works, the metaverse is peering into Zuckerbergs asshole

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

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.

Meta is doing their best to make this vision come true, lol