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This has been what every techno-optimist has said about every technology since the dawn of the commercial internet, and it's always been wrong. There will be op

by xxpor 5y ago

This has been what every techno-optimist has said about every technology since the dawn of the commercial internet, and it's always been wrong. There will be open standards up to the layer the user actually interacts with, and that final layer will be proprietary. It's basic aggregation theory (to continue the Ben Thompson point). There's too much money to be made, and modularized systems are too complicated for most people. Why did XMPP fail? Why is Discord more popular than Matrix? Why does Twitter still stomp Mastodon? Etc.

zaik 5y ago
XMPP failed only in the sense that Facebook and Google decided to stop participating in the federation. Other than that it's still alive and a good way to communicate.
oneepic 5y ago
What do money and modularization have to do with Twitter stomping Mastodon? IMO it would happen because Mastodon mostly looks like the same product to most people, just more complicated and it's not as easy to find and follow interesting people. My anecdata is that I joined out of curiosity and quit the same day, because it just looked like the same sarcasm and shitposters that made me drift away from Twitter.
TrevorJ 5y ago
Hmm. The closest analogue to metaverse is probably the internet. And the way that played out is probably the most notable counterexample to your claim. It's not clear to me that it's a foregone conclusion how this will play out.
- enos_feedler 5y ago
  Well its true the internet's most valuable open layers are TCP/IP and worked up to the user interaction layer (HTML5), but then shifted to proprietary/locked experiences. I think the reason is the answer to this simple question: What creates a better experience for an individual user? more money invested into the platform? or agreement of a protocol? It's money. And thats a deleware c corp. Until incremental investment leads to only infinitesimal experience change, we will be operating in this mode.
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  I think a better example is the app stores. HTTP + HTML was "pre commercial" or commercial-dawn. Adding JS was a pro-commerical act, and it enabled richer experiences. We later got mobile-apps, which are often website-adjacent in function and UI. They're less common standards in how they're built (proprietary device api's, competing languages across brands, etc). We still have the ability to deep-link across apps, but its much less common than on web, and its not as easy to "extract" a deep link for sharing, its basically the developers choise. I predict the commercial metaverse will be the same, we'll need deep-linking, and we'll get it. We need some standardized file formats (for things like 3d models, avatar clothes maybe), but mostly it'll be siloed experiences that are made for each platform. We're a little better off here than with phones because we already have game engines that allow some portability of rendering and UI logic. Is that enough to re-create the HTML-style free web? probably not.

by xxpor 5y ago

zaik 5y ago

XMPP failed only in the sense that Facebook and Google decided to stop participating in the federation. Other than that it's still alive and a good way to communicate.

oneepic 5y ago

What do money and modularization have to do with Twitter stomping Mastodon? IMO it would happen because Mastodon mostly looks like the same product to most people, just more complicated and it's not as easy to find and follow interesting people. My anecdata is that I joined out of curiosity and quit the same day, because it just looked like the same sarcasm and shitposters that made me drift away from Twitter.

TrevorJ 5y ago

Hmm. The closest analogue to metaverse is probably the internet. And the way that played out is probably the most notable counterexample to your claim. It's not clear to me that it's a foregone conclusion how this will play out.

enos_feedler 5y ago
Well its true the internet's most valuable open layers are TCP/IP and worked up to the user interaction layer (HTML5), but then shifted to proprietary/locked experiences. I think the reason is the answer to this simple question: What creates a better experience for an individual user? more money invested into the platform? or agreement of a protocol? It's money. And thats a deleware c corp. Until incremental investment leads to only infinitesimal experience change, we will be operating in this mode.
vineyardmike 5y ago
I think a better example is the app stores. HTTP + HTML was "pre commercial" or commercial-dawn. Adding JS was a pro-commerical act, and it enabled richer experiences. We later got mobile-apps, which are often website-adjacent in function and UI. They're less common standards in how they're built (proprietary device api's, competing languages across brands, etc). We still have the ability to deep-link across apps, but its much less common than on web, and its not as easy to "extract" a deep link for sharing, its basically the developers choise. I predict the commercial metaverse will be the same, we'll need deep-linking, and we'll get it. We need some standardized file formats (for things like 3d models, avatar clothes maybe), but mostly it'll be siloed experiences that are made for each platform. We're a little better off here than with phones because we already have game engines that allow some portability of rendering and UI logic. Is that enough to re-create the HTML-style free web? probably not.