Centralization, Decentralization, and Internet Standards

The world is locked inside a walled garden. If you don't like SL's rules, you don't get to touch anything SL related. You can't talk to your SL friends without logging into SL.

The server code is closed source. You must use the central infrastructure. In some cases, like SL, the client is open.

They sell add-ons like storage space for your stuff, and things like avatars you can directly buy. Some have an internal economy, but eg, Second Life quickly moved to being the official owners of the internal marketplace, and tax transactions.

If you want to have a permanent chunk of the world in SL, you pay for that, monthly.

All pretty standard. Now compare High Fidelity.

You install the client, open it, and instantly you show up in-world with no login screen required.

For data storage the solution is to pay any random web provider, or use the free AWS S3 tier. Any asset is just an URL pointing to https://example.com/file.gltf -- served from any random server, downloaded client-side, and outside HiFi's control.

Okay, so you pay for hosting your own environment? Nope. You host it on any Windows or Linux host you like, or the installer will even automatically install a server locally, easily start it from a menu, and NAT hole punch so you can host stuff on your laptop if you want to.

Tax Alice selling stuff to Bob? Well, the system is so open that anyone can set up their own shop if they want to. The source code for the shop is open, so is both the server and client. Since assets are hosted externally, nothing prevents Alice paying Bob with Paypal, emailing a file, and escaping any taxation.

Excluding people who break the rules? No such thing, there's no "grid". You can only be banned from individual worlds, like HN blocking you off doesn't mean anything for Ars Technica.

And all of that was Apache 2.0 licensed, so anybody who wanted could absolutely set up their own commercial operation and not share any of their own improvements.

If it was me running it, I'd have put the AGPL on it to discourage competitors, and either focus completely on custom setups for whoever needs one, or try to run a very light operation subsisting from Patreon.

Twitter is a walled garden though. This is more like if Twitter built Mastodon, and nearly everyone ran their own server.

So you what, sell ads? But everyone browses from their own install which doesn't serve any.

Part of the squeezing strategy is that you have a captive audience that can be suddenly asked to pay, or watch ads and they don't want to lose their social network, so they do. But this model had no such thing.

What I heard was that their intended model was "tax the economy", but besides being trivial to work around in the architecture, every content creator I met hated the completely wide open architecture. There's no way to protect content in the system. Not only it's trivial to grab somebody else's stuff, you can't be punished for doing so.

In the physical world, space is a limited resource that sells at a premium. You have benefit from things being in a reasonable distance for walking/traveling. Being near water has real-world benefits for transportation and trade as well as agriculture.

A virtual world is still based on fundamental spatial concepts like needing to travel, having benefit of proximity/association, and so on.

So there needs to be a specific set of decisions made on how to deal with spatial assumptions when they go counter to your design goals:

- Games have instanced areas because otherwise there would be physically too many people to move, or allow you to walk through other people to get around.

- A chat service might represent _your_ rooms off a hub, rather than a megaplex conference center of all rooms.

- Individual zones might be represented as distinct 'worlds' with portal entrances, to allow for each to have its own spatial rules (and even physics), where each has its own sense of layout/locality.

each of these has their own sets of trade-offs, but importantly you want consistency for users. That set of trade-offs literally lead to representing the world as a walled garden.

That is before you get to business interests being first and foremost around succeeding with their own products, not interoperability with nonexistent or noncooperative competitors. The market has to hit a point where vendors agree that interoperability is important enough to accept the tradeoffs that come with it, before any technical effort there can succeed.