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0 pointsethbr04y ago0 comments

They are not fantasies. They're one set of potential outcomes.

The fundamental laws that determine whether decentralization or centralization dominates is the rate of accessible content creation.

If a centralized organization (AOL & Yahoo, early and late 90s respectively) can create more content than the Internet (decentralized, early/mid 90s), then the former dominates.

If the greater number of content developers afforded by a decentralized system can create more content (Internet, late 90s - 10s), then it dominates.

Attempting to co-opt both strengths via platforms (Google & Facebook, 10s - now) is a newer phenomenon, but fundamentally still has the same tension.

If anyone wants decentralized metaverse to prevail, work on open dev tooling, content creation tools, and client standards. Not because they'll shift the balance, but because with them creators will shift the balance.

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ngokevin4y ago· 2 in thread

I've lived through this with aframe.io and as part of the original WebVR team. It was one of the top frameworks with a large community, but content creators at a nascent stage can't shift the balance without control of the browsers or spec

prox4y ago

Can you elaborate? You mean Content creators need control of the browser (development) ?

ngokevin4y ago

Some control over the direction of the spec to avoid situations like taking years to rewrite a working shipped spec, removing controller support, removing haptics, adding unneeded APIs, focusing on Cardboard and 3DOF, removing or not supporting link traversal, fuzzing headset tracking data. Or to be able to get useful features such as access to the headset camera or a way to bind textures without giant framedrops

If there was to be a "standardized/decentralized" "metaverse", things would have to move much faster. Think of all the features a "metaverse" might want, and each item would have to go through spec gatekeepers that don't even use/develop VR

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