I’d much rather see sites like Lemmy, PeerTube, and Mastodon see widespread adoption then the dystopian cyberpunk fever dream in the head of Zuckerburg. Did you not read the novel dude? It’s a freaking warning! That’s like Jeff Bezos reading Fahrenheit 451 and going “holy crap dude, gotta make that a reality like, yesterday!” I want the Fediverse, not the Metaverse! Thank you for coming to my TedTalk.
“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.
In my opinion, Fediverse is just a very fancy email service. My Fediverse ID is xavier666@lemm.ee 😁
It’s a good analogy - in the days before email, all you had was a username @ your BBS (Bulletin Board Server). You dialed into your local BBS’s landlines with a modem - they usually had 2-4 numbers available, so that gives you an idea of scale. The BBS systems were federated so user@bbs1 could see and respond to the same threads as user@bbs2. It was nice - it worked pretty much like the fediverse actually - and the tone was similar.
The messaging systems on the BBS communities evolved into email and Usenet before big money came along and fucked everything up.