Originally published at: Disney shuts down its "Metaverse" division | Boing Boing
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It’s too bad that these virtual places disappear when the plug is pulled on the servers.
You can’t come back later to find a ruined amusement park filled with gangs, digital homeless, and mutant feral toons.
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“I don’t think this thing has legs” is literally an idiom indicating something that is unlikely to succeed or continue to exist much longer.
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Meanwhile VR Chat is still going decently strong.
Maybe it’s because they didn’t try to turn it into a dull grey box for businesses or sell ugly monkey jpegs through it…
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sad_trombone.mp3
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You haven’t logged into Second Life in awhile, I assume.
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Wasn’t it always like that?
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Yes, only now there’s lots less people.
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I recently re-activated my account there, and I might have seen one other person in the area I was in for the short time I was in there.
My account is still there, but it’s been left for bit rot. I know no one else in there for socialization, and I’d have to re-learn pretty much everything all over again. I was at least glad I could fetch the custom textures I had created in there some 20 years ago, as they ended up getting lost between system moves over the years.
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Walled metaverses are so stupid, imagine if you had to have dedicated app just to go to a website. There are open standards and browser based metaverse options that work but the corporate overlords can’t completely control so meta, disney et al. don’t understand how to use it.
This reminds me of people shuttering web work because the internet died in the 2000s .com crash.
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I think it’s been about 2 years since I logged in, and when I did, I couldn’t even do anything except chat with friends because the computer I had at the time was seriously underpowered for Second Life. I logged in because I had heard that a community I used to be a part of there was still getting together once a week and I thought it might be fun to reconnect. It wasn’t.
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I hate that Facebook co-opted the term “metaverse” to mean their specific social media VR bullshit, as it was already in such diverse usage, and it really muddied the waters even worse. (Somehow their rebranding just encouraged other companies to adopt the term for a pretty random array of projects/business models.) In this case, it could mean they were jumping on that social media bandwagon to make sure they had a presence when it finally took off, but it sounds like it was actually just some sort of exploration of some sort of immersive (maybe VR, maybe social) experiences? I would think there would always be some room for that kind of exploration, given what sort of business Disney is in… it must have been a highly specific vision of the “metaverse” to get shut down entirely.
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As far as I can see, the Facebook Metaverse is very much like PlayStation Home from the early 2010s except it doesn’t look as good, doesn’t support as many users, and costs a lot more for special hardware to access it.
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Those are known as “mobile apps”
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Objection! The 1985 Amiga demo had legs and much more fluid movement than that:
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It really is astonishing.
To me it makes the point that these tech billionaires are not visionary geniuses. They just got lucky once and have been coasting ever since. Facebook was in the right place at the right time. It succeeded in spite of Zuck, not because of him.
When given a blank cheque and infinite resources to truly come up with a vision and pursue it unencumbered, we got legless Amiga demos for $36 billion dollars. That’s who Zuck actually is.
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… but that’s what THIS is—we’re already here 
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