Metaverse that was, but not like they wanted
Publication date: 13 June 2025 | Read time: 13 min | Listen time: 19 min
Click to listen to a fully human, non-AI reading of the article (length: 18:37)
Remember when the Metaverse was the new hot buzzword? It wasn't even that long ago; Facebook rebranded to Meta just in 2021. Such a strange moment in time. The big tech decided to make a shared, virtual world, that'd be so ubiquitous it'd be a part of everyday life. For the gaming community, worlds like that are nothing new - and their great social value is something that's well understood. So a world that'd be of the scale and reach of Facebook, backed by the near-infinite budgets of the IT giants?
Yeah, I don't know. That's what the general public seems to have answered. The journalists who were roped into talking about it let out a press equivalent of a nervous laughter. The people who would be interested seemed to just wait for a product worth using. The true believers seemed to only be interested in whatever value could be extracted from it, rather than the idea itself.
Still, that didn't prevent a lot of very rich people to throw some heavy money at the concept. A concept that now - just a few years later - seems like a fever dream, leaving us with this unmistakable feeling of "did this even actually happen?"
It most assuredly did; but that's not even that strangest thing about it all. The people building the Metaverse might as well have been saying, "We're working on this new shape. It's supposed to consist of just one line, with no angles - and it's going to revolutionise the transportation technologies!". To which, of course, the only reasonable answer would be "Do you mean the circle? We've already been using it for a few years, give or take".
After all, VRChat's been out since the mid 2010s.
No, really. VRChat is everything that the Metaverse aspired to be. You're probably thinking, "isn't it just chatting, but in VR?". It's not. Well, it can be just that, in the same sense that a tuxedo can be just a piece of cloth.
But to examine this claim, we need to define what exactly the Metaverse wanted to be. That's probably easier said than done, though; the evangelists always were pretty vague about this subject, seemingly on purpose - to let you vibe it out, and make your mind fill in the gaps with your own wishes and expectations. I don't want to spend too much time on this; let's just quickly take a look at the transcript of a 2017 ad for Decentraland - one of the biggest contenders for the Metaverse.
What if you could own the virtual world? Create, develop, and trade without limits, make genuine connections, and earn real money!
Decentraland. A fully immersive platform powered by the blockchain.
Buy land, design your experience, and transform the way people see the world.
Purchase the first-ever virtual real estate.
Get started today.
If we enrich this piece by elements implied from their outspoken fascination by Ready Player One and the like, we get a definition that's something like this:
A society-scale shared and persistent social space which gives creative powers to its users, with de-centralised ownership and immersive enough that it could become a second reality.
"You can't possibly be claiming that VRChat fits that definition, right?" you're probably thinking. Eh, it's close enough. It's not exactly society-scale - but you'll note that a lot of people who are very online have tried VRChat at some point at the very least, and its existing community is quite sizable. The game's not persistent, either - not by default, at least. The worlds are instanced, so all changes to a world are lost when the instance is closed - but persistence is something that's been recently implemented, and if a world chooses to use this feature, then it does become persistent. This isn't always something desirable, of course; for example, if you could just reset your flat to how it was before that massive party, you'd probably do it. And yes, the worlds tend to get very messy: misplaced items, scribbles, stickers. But if a world could benefit from having persistence, then this functionality does already exist.
The remaining parts of the definition, though? They fit. Bar a few worlds and avatars, the entirety of VRChat content is user-made, and user-managed. The world creation system is robust enough that the world creators can easily inject their own software solutions. Furry Karaoke for example has a complex, standalone song database that can be viewed and modified outside of the game. The instances themselves are hosted by VRChat, but that doesn't give them much control over what's actually happening there.
The creation systems are all just Unity - for worlds and avatars both. Since all data formats are public and standardised, it's possible for users to buy an avatar directly from a creator and modify it according to their own desires and abilities - in fact, it's quite a common thing among the regulars, with dedicated Marketplaces both inside and outside the game. If you have the technical know-how and artistic talent you can do almost anything.
As for immersion? Well. Roughly a year ago I wrote a review of VRChat - and in it, I pointed out that for many it becomes the main social outlet, and even where they live out their nightlife; it's very real to them. Perhaps even hyper-real - they get to be who they truly feel they are, without worrying about being socially excluded. Kind of like on the internet of eld, isn't it?
In fact, Lömsk Kråka, a friend of mine who joined me for a few sessions, called the game in his review a "mIRC for the modern era" - and this is no coincidence. Many people who remember how the internet used to be make this connection completely independently of each other. How could you not? It's free. Unrestricted. Community-driven. Also community-moderated (or even self-moderated), which sometimes means un-moderated. It's by the people, for the people - pretty much all content (worlds, avatars) is created and managed by its users.
What this also means is that it is very horny. Very queer. Very neurodivergent. To quote Kråka again, "it tries to be in the shape of a uniting force for all the outsiders of the world". In our reality of puritan, US-run megacorporations who cater primarily to advertisers, these two factors - freedom and non-conformism - make VRChat very difficult to monetise.
And profit has always been the only real motive of the Metaverse. Notice my highly inconspicuous marking of certain words in the transcript of Decentraland's trailer. That's also why NFTs often came up in the same discussion as the Metaverse.
But for these things to work, the platform needs to be designed with them in mind. VRChat simply isn't.
This - in my opinion - is why it was excluded from the public Metaverse discourse. Of course, you could just say that the corporations could easily take over VRChat and, shall we say, sanitise it; but not only that would rid the world of most of its content and its (creative) denizens, it's also functionally impossible. VRChat's architecture gives its operators very little control over what's going on in their world, something they proudly proclaim is by design. And if memory serves, the only time they did something that was met with huge community backlash was when they banned all mods, which - as they claimed - was a huge security risk. I'm not here to discuss whether this decision was right or not, just to point out that it happened.
We also can't ignore the fact that VRChat simply offers a better experience. In a 2022 Keynote, Mark Zuckerberg famously stated that
Seriously, the legs are hard. Which is why other Virtual Reality systems don't have them either.
"Other" VR systems? I suppose VRChat is not a VR System then, since it's had legs since, well, pretty much forever - and Full Body Tracking (FBT) has been around as early as 2018. To give Meta some grace, VRChat's implementation doesn't do a direct emulation of your leg position, something that Zuckerberg later claims is absolutely necessary for immersion - but it turns out nobody cares, and there are crafty solutions for this problem anyway (such as GoGo Loco).
And this is saying nothing of the, hmm, aesthetic choices of the Metaverse contenders. I mean, in a world where you can be literally anything, why would you choose to look like this? Sure, not everyone might want to be an anime girl, but why limit yourself to what's humanly possible? You can be Godzilla! You can be a furry! You can be Luigi! You can be a house plant (you'd be surprised how wild and positive the reactions to this one are)! Sure, it might be aesthetically incoherent, but isn't having more options an unquestionably desirable thing?
Perhaps it isn't - if your customers aren't the people who are going to use your product, but investors and digital landlords; you're not going to present a picture of an ahegao-faced anime girl at a business negotiation meeting, are you? Besides, who cares about what the people want? They can be corralled into using our products anyway.
After all, we control the information flow.
Okay, that's quite a claim; one that I can't entirely prove, but let's speculate a little. A while ago it came to light that ChatGPT instantly freezes when asked about the name "David Mayer"; naturally, conspiracies arose as to why - but OpenAI gave a different, vague explanation - privacy laws. I find that a very convenient excuse, coming from a company that clearly doesn't seem to care about things like consent or ownership, especially since individual contributions have been called "worthless". But perhaps for once they weren't lying?
They were, they weren't, that's irrelevant here. This whole incident draws attention to the very real possibility that information could be omitted - due to bugs, explicit blacklisting, or algorithmic decisions; and this particular name is something that we actually found to have "issues". Isn't it then in the realm of possibility that there are other names, keywords, whatever, that have had their visibility decreased successfully - and were never found as a result?
Alright, let's take off the tinfoil hats. This was about OpenAI, and the Metaverse was mostly, well, Meta. There are a bunch of other reasons why VRChat wouldn't come up in the discussions about the Metaverse. But it can't be denied that if VRChat was presented as a successful, already developed instance of the Metaverse, the whole business of selling pipe dreams to hapless investors simply evaporates. VRChat is. It's tangible. It's realised. It has features, limitations, a community. This is what you've been trying to fund, and look: it's not suits, skyscrapers, offices and billboards - it's gay furries and programmer-socks-wearing transgirls bing chilling at a femboy strip club.
In other words, this would've been a disastrous business decision, costing a lot of people a lot of money.
So even if no evil technological shenanigans are at play, simply omitting certain topics when talking to the media and the public can have very real effects on the perceived shape of our world. And when just a few players control the gateways to the web - social media, search engines, hosting services - it becomes very easy (not to mention profitable) to steer the flow of information a little to make sure things stay the way they are. Or towards paid advertisments.
But that's nothing new. The political power of controlling the information has always been undeniable (and often underestimated). And while we're not talking about politics, but about marketing - at this scale and levels of power, I think the distinction becomes a lot less relevant. The civic solution to this problem is free press: sources of information that do not pass through the filters of those in power. To translate this into our techno-feudalist reality, we need a part of the internet which is not in the pocket of Silicon Valley billionaires and their allies.
One such place is - bear with me here - TikTok. Now, I'll fully admit that its addictive design is awful, the unacceptably weak moderation allows for false information to reach a lot of people very easily, and the libertine approach of state capitalist China towards civil liberties ensure that TikTok's value as a worthwhile source of any important news can - and should - be disputed. Yet, one must acknowledge that it is a powerful online presence which is explicitly not affiliated with the US big tech, which is also why there are ongoing efforts to change that.
To an extent, Reddit has also been somewhat independent - despite its Silicon Valley affiliation; the raw, quasi-anonymous flow of information in enclosed communities ensured there's a lot of community-sourced stuff to be found there. This has even been acknowledged by Google, as they outright suggest that you should search for whatever you're looking again, but with "reddit" added to your query. But - as everybody who spent any amount of time on that platform knows - the communities develop their own groupthink which is enforced by the upvote/downvote system, the mods can relatively easily steer the discussion by pinning, hiding and deleting posts, and the management of Reddit has shown many times that they're not above engaging in direct, aggressive censorship. So Reddit isn't really a solution, either.
Of course, there's the indie web - but that has very limited discoverability, as it generally works by interconnectedness and passing links around. There's actually a lot of people invested in this movement, and surprisingly, many of them are very young. For them it's a chance to live the 2000s online fantasy, something they never experienced; and good for them, I say. I might not get their reasons all that much, but our goals are quite aligned in this matter.
So it doesn't seem like there's much hope, huh. But that's strange. Don't you think something should fill this hole? Something should be here, but it isn't - or we can't see it?
In 2022, A Lone Husk bought Twitter, and proceeded to run it into the ground by firing moderation teams and reinstating multiple banned accounts, including Donald Trump's. In a shocking moment of clarity, people realised that having their main communication platform being so easily overtaken by an ultra-rich proponent of very questionable political views is a little troubling; so, many fled to Mastodon - a platform that's actually decentralised, run by an European non-profit and with no corporate backing or, indeed, opportunity for monetisation. I'm getting Deja Vu here.
Unfortunately, this exodus was temporary. Most of the refugees found Mastodon's decentralisation and lack of algorithmic content feeds too much of a hassle to deal with, so not many stuck around - instead opting to go to Bluesky. It's also decentralised, or at least it claims to be; a claim that is only theoretically true, as pretty much the entire network runs on the main instance. It's Twitter, but a few years behind. It has the backing of Silicon Valley, it's operated by a single entity, it's even founded by Jack Dorsey, the man behind Twitter. It's fine, it will be different this time!
As much as I love blaming everyday people for their lack of foresight, let's be honest here: Mastodon never stood a chance. They didn't have the marketing budgets, the high-profile proponents, the infrastructure, the dedicated teams to quickly implement new features requested by the community, no metrics to discover what sort of issues the people could have, I could go on. Not when there is a perfectly viable alternative that does have all these things due to their corporate backing. And as things are now, all competition will be easily snuffed out due to how stacked the deck is; the only force I can see having enough power to compete is China, which I've already argued isn't a good alternative.
And yet - just like VRChat happily existed before, during, and after the Metaverse boom, the same can be said of Mastodon and the Fediverse - just on a much smaller scale. Ever heard of Pixelfed? Pleroma? Lemmy? That's right, the alternatives have been here all along. And they've been conveniently excluded from the conversation; whether by omission, lack of popularity, no marketing or intentional suppression, that doesn't really matter in the end, does it. The services are there. It's just up to us to use them.
As long as the internet retains the shape it has today, the Fediverse will always have issues with popularity and infrastructure. It's unattractive to the capital holders and its leftist community greatly limits the donations it can receive (since being a leftist usually means choosing integrity over money and power). VRChat's source of income is mostly paid subscriptions - ones that don't provide much benefit, and are generally seen as a way to support the company first and foremost. The Fediverse could adopt this method; this is how Proton Mail operates. Paid subscribers are the ones who enable free service for others. But I have a better, perhaps more radical idea.
Mastodon's operators are based in Germany. Ever since Trump came back to power, Europe's been talking about how dangerous our reliance on US tech is - and ideas about developing local solutions have been thrown around. So it seems like a no-brainer that the Fediverse could be financed by the governments - European Union in particular.
Yes, I did just suggest that the free media should be government-funded, yes, I see the irony, no, I don't think that changes anything. As long as the EU's governance is decentralised, abuse of power is a lot less likely; in fact, it's the other way around. EU's power is so distributed, it has issues with dealing with its rogue members, such as Hungary. Besides, I truly believe that in the modern times the threats to our societies come not from our governments, but from the ultra-rich; and in cases where the governments do become a threat - Russia, China, the US - the rich will gladly support their leaders with their massive power. Adding a little bit of democracy to the funding structure of our media can only be a good thing.
Alternatively, you can, you know, join. And participate. And share.
Try out VRChat. It's free, and doesn't actually need a headset. You'll probably have a rough landing, but once you find your footing, you'll have an excellent, unforgettable time. I mean, where else can you take a selfie with Guts in drag?
Try the Fediverse, if you haven't already. Follow me on Mastodon. See what's going on in the alternative web. Again, your landing will be most definitely rough, if you even manage to join - my advice is to not overthink which instance you'll be based on, just go with the default one, you can change it later without losing followers or anything of the sort. It might seem a little empty and spammy at first (at the same time, yes), but if you take responsibility for what content you want to see and choose the right people and hashtags to follow, and which content to filter out - you'll notice there's plenty of very interesting people discussing a wide variety of topics.
And finally, go visit the websites of people you like, not just their social media. Subscribe to their mailing lists, their RSS feeds, and if you can afford it, their Patreons and the like. Hell, I'd tell you to support me (if you'd like, of course)... but I don't actually have a mailing list or a Pateron. I do have a RSS feed, at least; hey, it's a work in progress.
Resist, ye punks. Be gay, do crime, share each other's nonsense. We don't have to win to make the internet a more livable place.
Yeah, I don't know. That's what the general public seems to have answered. The journalists who were roped into talking about it let out a press equivalent of a nervous laughter. The people who would be interested seemed to just wait for a product worth using. The true believers seemed to only be interested in whatever value could be extracted from it, rather than the idea itself.
Still, that didn't prevent a lot of very rich people to throw some heavy money at the concept. A concept that now - just a few years later - seems like a fever dream, leaving us with this unmistakable feeling of "did this even actually happen?"
It most assuredly did; but that's not even that strangest thing about it all. The people building the Metaverse might as well have been saying, "We're working on this new shape. It's supposed to consist of just one line, with no angles - and it's going to revolutionise the transportation technologies!". To which, of course, the only reasonable answer would be "Do you mean the circle? We've already been using it for a few years, give or take".
After all, VRChat's been out since the mid 2010s.
No, really. VRChat is everything that the Metaverse aspired to be. You're probably thinking, "isn't it just chatting, but in VR?". It's not. Well, it can be just that, in the same sense that a tuxedo can be just a piece of cloth.
But to examine this claim, we need to define what exactly the Metaverse wanted to be. That's probably easier said than done, though; the evangelists always were pretty vague about this subject, seemingly on purpose - to let you vibe it out, and make your mind fill in the gaps with your own wishes and expectations. I don't want to spend too much time on this; let's just quickly take a look at the transcript of a 2017 ad for Decentraland - one of the biggest contenders for the Metaverse.
What if you could own the virtual world? Create, develop, and trade without limits, make genuine connections, and earn real money!
Decentraland. A fully immersive platform powered by the blockchain.
Buy land, design your experience, and transform the way people see the world.
Purchase the first-ever virtual real estate.
Get started today.
If we enrich this piece by elements implied from their outspoken fascination by Ready Player One and the like, we get a definition that's something like this:
A society-scale shared and persistent social space which gives creative powers to its users, with de-centralised ownership and immersive enough that it could become a second reality.
"You can't possibly be claiming that VRChat fits that definition, right?" you're probably thinking. Eh, it's close enough. It's not exactly society-scale - but you'll note that a lot of people who are very online have tried VRChat at some point at the very least, and its existing community is quite sizable. The game's not persistent, either - not by default, at least. The worlds are instanced, so all changes to a world are lost when the instance is closed - but persistence is something that's been recently implemented, and if a world chooses to use this feature, then it does become persistent. This isn't always something desirable, of course; for example, if you could just reset your flat to how it was before that massive party, you'd probably do it. And yes, the worlds tend to get very messy: misplaced items, scribbles, stickers. But if a world could benefit from having persistence, then this functionality does already exist.
The remaining parts of the definition, though? They fit. Bar a few worlds and avatars, the entirety of VRChat content is user-made, and user-managed. The world creation system is robust enough that the world creators can easily inject their own software solutions. Furry Karaoke for example has a complex, standalone song database that can be viewed and modified outside of the game. The instances themselves are hosted by VRChat, but that doesn't give them much control over what's actually happening there.
The creation systems are all just Unity - for worlds and avatars both. Since all data formats are public and standardised, it's possible for users to buy an avatar directly from a creator and modify it according to their own desires and abilities - in fact, it's quite a common thing among the regulars, with dedicated Marketplaces both inside and outside the game. If you have the technical know-how and artistic talent you can do almost anything.
As for immersion? Well. Roughly a year ago I wrote a review of VRChat - and in it, I pointed out that for many it becomes the main social outlet, and even where they live out their nightlife; it's very real to them. Perhaps even hyper-real - they get to be who they truly feel they are, without worrying about being socially excluded. Kind of like on the internet of eld, isn't it?
In fact, Lömsk Kråka, a friend of mine who joined me for a few sessions, called the game in his review a "mIRC for the modern era" - and this is no coincidence. Many people who remember how the internet used to be make this connection completely independently of each other. How could you not? It's free. Unrestricted. Community-driven. Also community-moderated (or even self-moderated), which sometimes means un-moderated. It's by the people, for the people - pretty much all content (worlds, avatars) is created and managed by its users.
What this also means is that it is very horny. Very queer. Very neurodivergent. To quote Kråka again, "it tries to be in the shape of a uniting force for all the outsiders of the world". In our reality of puritan, US-run megacorporations who cater primarily to advertisers, these two factors - freedom and non-conformism - make VRChat very difficult to monetise.
And profit has always been the only real motive of the Metaverse. Notice my highly inconspicuous marking of certain words in the transcript of Decentraland's trailer. That's also why NFTs often came up in the same discussion as the Metaverse.
But for these things to work, the platform needs to be designed with them in mind. VRChat simply isn't.
This - in my opinion - is why it was excluded from the public Metaverse discourse. Of course, you could just say that the corporations could easily take over VRChat and, shall we say, sanitise it; but not only that would rid the world of most of its content and its (creative) denizens, it's also functionally impossible. VRChat's architecture gives its operators very little control over what's going on in their world, something they proudly proclaim is by design. And if memory serves, the only time they did something that was met with huge community backlash was when they banned all mods, which - as they claimed - was a huge security risk. I'm not here to discuss whether this decision was right or not, just to point out that it happened.
We also can't ignore the fact that VRChat simply offers a better experience. In a 2022 Keynote, Mark Zuckerberg famously stated that
Seriously, the legs are hard. Which is why other Virtual Reality systems don't have them either.
"Other" VR systems? I suppose VRChat is not a VR System then, since it's had legs since, well, pretty much forever - and Full Body Tracking (FBT) has been around as early as 2018. To give Meta some grace, VRChat's implementation doesn't do a direct emulation of your leg position, something that Zuckerberg later claims is absolutely necessary for immersion - but it turns out nobody cares, and there are crafty solutions for this problem anyway (such as GoGo Loco).
And this is saying nothing of the, hmm, aesthetic choices of the Metaverse contenders. I mean, in a world where you can be literally anything, why would you choose to look like this? Sure, not everyone might want to be an anime girl, but why limit yourself to what's humanly possible? You can be Godzilla! You can be a furry! You can be Luigi! You can be a house plant (you'd be surprised how wild and positive the reactions to this one are)! Sure, it might be aesthetically incoherent, but isn't having more options an unquestionably desirable thing?
Perhaps it isn't - if your customers aren't the people who are going to use your product, but investors and digital landlords; you're not going to present a picture of an ahegao-faced anime girl at a business negotiation meeting, are you? Besides, who cares about what the people want? They can be corralled into using our products anyway.
After all, we control the information flow.
Okay, that's quite a claim; one that I can't entirely prove, but let's speculate a little. A while ago it came to light that ChatGPT instantly freezes when asked about the name "David Mayer"; naturally, conspiracies arose as to why - but OpenAI gave a different, vague explanation - privacy laws. I find that a very convenient excuse, coming from a company that clearly doesn't seem to care about things like consent or ownership, especially since individual contributions have been called "worthless". But perhaps for once they weren't lying?
They were, they weren't, that's irrelevant here. This whole incident draws attention to the very real possibility that information could be omitted - due to bugs, explicit blacklisting, or algorithmic decisions; and this particular name is something that we actually found to have "issues". Isn't it then in the realm of possibility that there are other names, keywords, whatever, that have had their visibility decreased successfully - and were never found as a result?
Alright, let's take off the tinfoil hats. This was about OpenAI, and the Metaverse was mostly, well, Meta. There are a bunch of other reasons why VRChat wouldn't come up in the discussions about the Metaverse. But it can't be denied that if VRChat was presented as a successful, already developed instance of the Metaverse, the whole business of selling pipe dreams to hapless investors simply evaporates. VRChat is. It's tangible. It's realised. It has features, limitations, a community. This is what you've been trying to fund, and look: it's not suits, skyscrapers, offices and billboards - it's gay furries and programmer-socks-wearing transgirls bing chilling at a femboy strip club.
In other words, this would've been a disastrous business decision, costing a lot of people a lot of money.
So even if no evil technological shenanigans are at play, simply omitting certain topics when talking to the media and the public can have very real effects on the perceived shape of our world. And when just a few players control the gateways to the web - social media, search engines, hosting services - it becomes very easy (not to mention profitable) to steer the flow of information a little to make sure things stay the way they are. Or towards paid advertisments.
But that's nothing new. The political power of controlling the information has always been undeniable (and often underestimated). And while we're not talking about politics, but about marketing - at this scale and levels of power, I think the distinction becomes a lot less relevant. The civic solution to this problem is free press: sources of information that do not pass through the filters of those in power. To translate this into our techno-feudalist reality, we need a part of the internet which is not in the pocket of Silicon Valley billionaires and their allies.
One such place is - bear with me here - TikTok. Now, I'll fully admit that its addictive design is awful, the unacceptably weak moderation allows for false information to reach a lot of people very easily, and the libertine approach of state capitalist China towards civil liberties ensure that TikTok's value as a worthwhile source of any important news can - and should - be disputed. Yet, one must acknowledge that it is a powerful online presence which is explicitly not affiliated with the US big tech, which is also why there are ongoing efforts to change that.
To an extent, Reddit has also been somewhat independent - despite its Silicon Valley affiliation; the raw, quasi-anonymous flow of information in enclosed communities ensured there's a lot of community-sourced stuff to be found there. This has even been acknowledged by Google, as they outright suggest that you should search for whatever you're looking again, but with "reddit" added to your query. But - as everybody who spent any amount of time on that platform knows - the communities develop their own groupthink which is enforced by the upvote/downvote system, the mods can relatively easily steer the discussion by pinning, hiding and deleting posts, and the management of Reddit has shown many times that they're not above engaging in direct, aggressive censorship. So Reddit isn't really a solution, either.
Of course, there's the indie web - but that has very limited discoverability, as it generally works by interconnectedness and passing links around. There's actually a lot of people invested in this movement, and surprisingly, many of them are very young. For them it's a chance to live the 2000s online fantasy, something they never experienced; and good for them, I say. I might not get their reasons all that much, but our goals are quite aligned in this matter.
So it doesn't seem like there's much hope, huh. But that's strange. Don't you think something should fill this hole? Something should be here, but it isn't - or we can't see it?
In 2022, A Lone Husk bought Twitter, and proceeded to run it into the ground by firing moderation teams and reinstating multiple banned accounts, including Donald Trump's. In a shocking moment of clarity, people realised that having their main communication platform being so easily overtaken by an ultra-rich proponent of very questionable political views is a little troubling; so, many fled to Mastodon - a platform that's actually decentralised, run by an European non-profit and with no corporate backing or, indeed, opportunity for monetisation. I'm getting Deja Vu here.
Unfortunately, this exodus was temporary. Most of the refugees found Mastodon's decentralisation and lack of algorithmic content feeds too much of a hassle to deal with, so not many stuck around - instead opting to go to Bluesky. It's also decentralised, or at least it claims to be; a claim that is only theoretically true, as pretty much the entire network runs on the main instance. It's Twitter, but a few years behind. It has the backing of Silicon Valley, it's operated by a single entity, it's even founded by Jack Dorsey, the man behind Twitter. It's fine, it will be different this time!
As much as I love blaming everyday people for their lack of foresight, let's be honest here: Mastodon never stood a chance. They didn't have the marketing budgets, the high-profile proponents, the infrastructure, the dedicated teams to quickly implement new features requested by the community, no metrics to discover what sort of issues the people could have, I could go on. Not when there is a perfectly viable alternative that does have all these things due to their corporate backing. And as things are now, all competition will be easily snuffed out due to how stacked the deck is; the only force I can see having enough power to compete is China, which I've already argued isn't a good alternative.
And yet - just like VRChat happily existed before, during, and after the Metaverse boom, the same can be said of Mastodon and the Fediverse - just on a much smaller scale. Ever heard of Pixelfed? Pleroma? Lemmy? That's right, the alternatives have been here all along. And they've been conveniently excluded from the conversation; whether by omission, lack of popularity, no marketing or intentional suppression, that doesn't really matter in the end, does it. The services are there. It's just up to us to use them.
As long as the internet retains the shape it has today, the Fediverse will always have issues with popularity and infrastructure. It's unattractive to the capital holders and its leftist community greatly limits the donations it can receive (since being a leftist usually means choosing integrity over money and power). VRChat's source of income is mostly paid subscriptions - ones that don't provide much benefit, and are generally seen as a way to support the company first and foremost. The Fediverse could adopt this method; this is how Proton Mail operates. Paid subscribers are the ones who enable free service for others. But I have a better, perhaps more radical idea.
Mastodon's operators are based in Germany. Ever since Trump came back to power, Europe's been talking about how dangerous our reliance on US tech is - and ideas about developing local solutions have been thrown around. So it seems like a no-brainer that the Fediverse could be financed by the governments - European Union in particular.
Yes, I did just suggest that the free media should be government-funded, yes, I see the irony, no, I don't think that changes anything. As long as the EU's governance is decentralised, abuse of power is a lot less likely; in fact, it's the other way around. EU's power is so distributed, it has issues with dealing with its rogue members, such as Hungary. Besides, I truly believe that in the modern times the threats to our societies come not from our governments, but from the ultra-rich; and in cases where the governments do become a threat - Russia, China, the US - the rich will gladly support their leaders with their massive power. Adding a little bit of democracy to the funding structure of our media can only be a good thing.
Alternatively, you can, you know, join. And participate. And share.
Try out VRChat. It's free, and doesn't actually need a headset. You'll probably have a rough landing, but once you find your footing, you'll have an excellent, unforgettable time. I mean, where else can you take a selfie with Guts in drag?
Try the Fediverse, if you haven't already. Follow me on Mastodon. See what's going on in the alternative web. Again, your landing will be most definitely rough, if you even manage to join - my advice is to not overthink which instance you'll be based on, just go with the default one, you can change it later without losing followers or anything of the sort. It might seem a little empty and spammy at first (at the same time, yes), but if you take responsibility for what content you want to see and choose the right people and hashtags to follow, and which content to filter out - you'll notice there's plenty of very interesting people discussing a wide variety of topics.
And finally, go visit the websites of people you like, not just their social media. Subscribe to their mailing lists, their RSS feeds, and if you can afford it, their Patreons and the like. Hell, I'd tell you to support me (if you'd like, of course)... but I don't actually have a mailing list or a Pateron. I do have a RSS feed, at least; hey, it's a work in progress.
Resist, ye punks. Be gay, do crime, share each other's nonsense. We don't have to win to make the internet a more livable place.