Ask HN: How is the “metaverse” concept different from the Second Life boom?

This, in fact, the real problem. Second Life really is a virtual world, not a game. You log in, and you're somewhere in a virtual world the size of Greater London. Now what? The virtual world itself is completely indifferent to you. You can do nothing, if you choose, and nothing will happen. You will not be attacked by monsters. You will not be destroyed by a shrinking vortex. You can go to an area that's not busy and sit or stand for as long as you want to stay logged in. A car might drive by. The sun will rise and set. Not much else will happen.

You can travel around and look at stuff. You can talk to people. There are games to play if you can find them. You can build stuff. You can sell stuff. But you have to find things to do. There are guides and search tools, but you have to use them. It's a "pull" system like the web, not a "push" system like Facebook.

This totally throws a sizable fraction of new users, mostly those who want a pre-structured entertainment experience. It's great for the fraction of the population that likes to build something from nothing. That small fraction.

The second part of "boring" is that Second Life is really sluggish. This is a fixable problem, stemming from legacy code from the era of OpenGL and single-CPU desktops.

Nobody has really looked hard enough at metaverse client theory yet. You have many of the problems of an MMO client, in that you have to present a real-time 3D environment. And you have many of the problems of a web browser, in that the network throws un-optimized stuff at you and you have to deal with it. The big game engines, UE5 and Unity, don't address that latter problem.

All this looks quite fixable, if you target a gamer-level GPU (even one from 5 years ago), a few CPUs, an SSD disk for caching, and over 100mb/s networking. This is what the average Steam user has. We ought to be able to get up to GTA V level visual quality and frame rate. Second Life has content that good.

A third problem with Second Life is that the social features are terrible. The group message system has been losing messages for a year due to a scaling problem. (It was designed so that you could talk to people in your party, not broadcast to your store's customer base.) The voice system, outsourced to Vivox, is flaky. There's two decades of technical debt and not much will or money to fix it.

Mainstream metaverse adoption may be a problem in the era of the $1000 phone and the $200 laptop. What we're seeing right now are new low-end virtual worlds that look like games from 15 years ago. Many run inside a browser. This may be why few people actually spend time in Decentraland. The VR headgear people really don't have much more compute power than a phone. Beat Saber, fine. Breakroom, OK. Big virtual world, not so much.

On line right now:

- Roblox: 1,446,121 users.

- Second Life: 35,008 users.

- VRchat: 29,072 users.

- Decentraland: 604 users.

- Facebook Horizon: they're not saying.

(Steel-manning the concept of course).

it's interesting to note that cory and babbage and beez and a raft of other lindens wound up at FB between 2009 and 2011. i went to pitch the idea of continuing the "open metaverse" and try to get FB to fund the VWRAP work, but no dice. 2010-2011 was way too early for virtual worlds or augmented worlds to be on the FB radar.

at linden, at the end, we wanted to build a shared world which could be fed with real or made up geo data and with a common protocol different organizations could use to cause a consistent, shared experience be delivered to end users.

the key here is "different organizations." by the end we were trying to build an open protocol linden could be a key player in, but not own it as a walled garden.

i think the prime difference here is FB wants to own the venue (walled garden) and sell different data layers to different communities.

i would be very surprised if they weren't working on an AR experience where advertisers could buy a data overlay identifying most likely consumers for specific services. so you're minding your business at the mall and someone walks up and says "excuse me ma'am, i notice you bought floral print shirt last week. we're having a sale on slacks that would complement that shirt and your colour pallette."

not to mention strossian "cop space" or a raft of less intrusive layers for different communities.

so... "own the venue" and "sell distinct value-added layers to different parties"

NSFW content will always find a way.

Always.