Thread by @decentricity

1/ Has the #Metaverse "Devolved"?
Me in the @SecondLife #Metaverse in 2013 vs me in the @cryptovoxels Metaverse in 2021. People sometimes ask me why the 2013 Metaverses "look better". I have an answer for these people and it's gonna take several tweets, bear with me...

2/ A bit of history: #Metaverses were created whole-cloth from the novel Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson. Active Worlds, which I actually tried (yes, I am that old) was fully based on that book's Metaverse, and provided the basis of all other Metaverses including @cryptovoxels...

3/ When it started, #Metaverses were totally separate and different from the concept of #onlinegames. The idea is to have more #socialimmersion and #userinteraction, not to have in-world goals to push the user in a direction...

4/ However, this shifted with the rise of "social games", and the integration of social features like chat within regular games. It also shifted due to the increasing open-world nature of games....

5/ The "holy grail" of gaming was -- and is -- immersion. Make stuff as realistic as possible, even if it requires a 1GB download to start the game. And due to the dovetailing of #Metaverse and #games, that principle of immersion started to get applied to the early #Metaverses.

6/ @SecondLife was the first to adopt this. And it was glorious for a 20 year old me -- a whole virtual world just like my favorite novel, Snow Crash? Wow. Just wow. I was probably one of the first people in Asia to just ape in on land. At one point I had 5 parcels!

7/ The realism even back then was top notch -- you can explore the world and look at sights, see people with avatars that look almost exactly like how they looked in the real world. It was amazing! I spent 7 years in SL... but then I had to leave.

8/ .... I left because Second Life was empty. It had been empty for awhile but it was emptying out more and more. I also left because even though I "own" the parcels on SL, if I don't pay the subscription fee, I lose the parcels.

9/ This actually happened to me in 2019 when I decided not to pay the subscription fee. I lost ownership of my building, although it is still there on SL (one of the oldest buildings around): metabizlist.com/directory/8480…

10/ ... (tangent: nope, @SecondLife never adopted #NFTs, instead choosing their own fully #centralized ownership mechanism for #land, #wearables, and #avatars. You lose ownership if you stop paying for Premium subscription. Which IMHO means it's just renting, with extra steps)

11/ Back to the point, Second Life was empty. Yes traffic picked up a bit during the #pandemic -- all #Metaverses did -- but it never reached mainstream #adoption. Second Life cities were like ghost towns.

12/ And here's the reason: Because of the focus on #immersion, no one *visits* SL casually, because it takes a download and a series of onboarding steps just to come in. #Realism requires good graphics, which requires a great client side app.

13/ Enter @cryptovoxels. Here is a #Metaverse that looks like Minecraft, doesn't care much about #realism, but is as #sociallyimmersive as Second Life because it has voice chats, custom avatars, in-world building, and -- best of all -- NO downloads required.

14/ Which means you can put a QR code or shortlink to your Cryptovoxels gallery in the real world / mainstream social media and have people visit and see your #NFTs by clicking that link, instantly.

15/ The key to #immersion has never been #realism, as it turns out, since the Metaverse is not a game. Immersive digital spaces are immersive because of #otherpeople.
You need to get the normies in-world, homie.

16/ You need to get the artists, creators, and architect majors in-world. You need to get your mom, dad, uncles, and aunts in-world. And with @cryptovoxels, that's something you can do. Give them a link. The world loads in their mobile browser. They're in your NFT gallery.

17/ All future Metaverses should follow this model. #socialimmersion is not borne out of #realism. It is borne out of instantly-usable tools to enter instantly viewable #worlds. This means designing the #Metaverse to the lowest common denominator -- browser-based, mobile friendly

18/ @cryptovoxels is not perfect. It's still, I feel, *too* immersive. You still need to give it your full attention when you're in-world, especially if you're doing something IRL like buying groceries. But it is currently the best thing we got.

19/ The future #Metaverse IMHO would be a side-by-side Metaverse, something that always runs on your phone, just like your @telegram or @WhatsApp chat apps. Something that you use as an adjunct to your real life, a place that your friends can visit at any time.

@telegram @WhatsApp 20/ And that would not be a devolution. That would be an #evolution, even a #revolution, of the #Metaverse to levels never seen before: Wide, constant, always-on adoption. Probably with #Roblox or #AnimalCrossing style avatars. But with the tech and asset ownership of #Blockchain

I've been a #Metaverse #degen before degen was even a word. When I see the current Metaverse, I get excited for the future.

Because Metaverses now have the opportunity to be a #normie thing, not a degen thing.

Because #Metaverses can be for #everyone.

-fin

Hey, good people! Thanks for the retweets and likes! Jump in-world to the @UniqueOne_UO gallery at unique.decentri.city and see a real Picasso-- a @burnedpicasso .

Also, visit my own humble little buildings at vr.decentri.city (offices) and vr3.decentri.city (my personal gallery where i host the @nftsnafu collective)

Also also, here's how i look in @cryptovoxels now!
(I paid a friend to make a voxel head based on my photo.)
If you see me in-world, say hello :)