I have what I think is a unique perspective on this.
Private small self run social media already exists. It's personal Minecraft servers.
When I was younger I ran a Minecraft server out of my toaster of a PC. Friends hopped on, made their own little houses, built stuff and talked. Friends would pass in and out and in order to get in you had to be invited! I'd say max there were 10-20 people on there somewhat consistently.
It was great, and better than social media or even game for hanging out with your friends IMO because it emulated synchronous human interaction instead of just setting up feeds where everything has to be "perfect".
It was easy enough for a 14 year old to setup, and administer. Mods made it hackable and fun.
I guess the metaverse was already a thing back then huh?
This has been like that with many multiplayer games to some extent before the age of matchmaking. Someone sets up a dedicated server with certain mods/game configuration, and that would be yours and other randoms favorite server. Over time, you'd actually become a community.
I've gone back to play Unreal Tournament 2004 this past year in such dedicated servers, and it made me realize how badly matchmaking ruined the sense of community in MP games.
That’s actually interesting—I used to really be into multiplayer games when I was a teenager into my early 20s, and have some great memories of virtual hangs with friends both real and offline. My interest in online gaming basically dropped to zero (or even negative) after that, which seems to coincidence with when matchmaking started becoming a thing. I think it was it Halo 2 that was the first big matchmaking game that I played and I just really couldn’t get into it at all, I just more or less assumed I was just getting older and losing interest in childhood hobbies but never connected it to the loss of community in my head. Thinking about all those multiplayer lobbies from yesteryear gives me pangs of nostalgia.
I follow the same arc. I grew up lugging network cables around to setup LAN parties for Warcraft and Command and Conquer. Then went to college and setup a Halflife server that our entire dorm got into. Even the non-gamers got into it creating their own characters (some of them naked... the characters not the players although you never know what's going on down the hall), and it was a source of bonding that I'll never forget.
Pretty soon after that World of Warcraft was introduced and games started getting more "massive" and I lost all interest in endless games with people I didn't know personally.
Almost 20 years later and when I'm able to sneak a game in, I only play single-player mode to follow the storyline.
I used to play on a specific cod multi-player server back when cod was only a single title. Knew handles of people on the server even though I didn't socialize much (would say hi and the like but nothing much more than that).
My second year of college my roommate and I were chatting and found out we both frequented that server and knew each other by our handles.
Even though I didn't use the dedicated servers as a social mechanism, just hanging out and playing with/against each other for countless hours was enough to seed a lasting friendship when we did meet irl.
Interesting, I was just thinking Halo 2 was great for that sort of thing. I have some fond memories of joining private parties and goofing around for hours hunting for glitches
> I've gone back to play Unreal Tournament 2004 this past year in such dedicated servers, and it made me realize how badly matchmaking ruined the sense of community in MP games.
I used to enjoy playing TF2 until 2013/14 or so. I settled into the No Heroes servers and after a while you get to know people. You pop on, see familiar names, say hello and you'd have a good time. It was like a small town which had a lot of other people passing through keeping things lively yet familiar.
Recently I tried to play TF2 again just for kicks. The community is dead. I played for maybe 30 min before exiting uninstalling and never looking back. Good job valve.
This is true, the game felt like it was waning in popularity around 2014. But I attribute that to the then new instant play and other UI changes which favored valves servers over community servers which were effectively on "page two". The communities dried up as a result.
All dating sites have effectively two sets of users: people who use it until they get a long-term partner (A), and people who can use it forever because they are unlikely or unwilling to get a long-term partner (B). That is effectively intrinsic to the activity they are born to serve (dating). This said, there are enough people belonging to the B set to keep them in business pretty much forever.
There is also the option to provide ramps for people in A towards some other form of socialization (double dates? dinner parties?), but I don't think anyone really tried it yet.
Well, that's only true when you consider matchmaking for short interactions, which surely prevents community bonding. Longer interactions do not prevent bonding.
As for Tinder... I'm pretty sure you can find the equivalent of "dedicated servers" where to form a community, but I don't think that's what most people would want.
A sprawling list of servers to join. Ahhh the memories. headshots jumping off the upper area of deck16. Console gaming and auto joining servers like in CoD. Bleh. Zero sense of community. Before we all met on IRC quakenet in random clan channels.
Unreal Tournament is the best example I've seen of this too. I played on a server for a while before realizing a good chunk of the people were there just to socialize and the game was really secondary.
Ah, the earlier days of Counter Strike were my version of this. Custom maps galore created by the community, custom game modes. WarCraft mod was my favorite, building XP for abilities on the server - definitely had a good community as the skills for use in game were earned and contained on the individual server.
A shame this vibrant and creative element of the game was stamped out.
This used to be the case with TeamSpeak/Mumble too back in the day. Some of my favorite memories as a teenager was setting up Teamspeak servers on a Linode box and setting up everything. I’m glad Discord is making that easier for kids today.
With no sarcasm or irony whatsoever, this is a fantastic way to stay connected with people—if you can be online at the same time as them regularly and they all actually want to play Minecraft.
The advantages you get with a more traditional-style private social media site are accessibility and asynchrony.
Did the same thing in a Minecraft predecessor called Blockland. Even ran a big mod pack that was all about social stuff like having IRC inside the game client. And what you say about invite-only is totally true. I used to run a fansite about an Xbox game that was still "unannounced" and the community was very non-toxic because I started a private forum on the IGN message boards where it was only full of people that mentioned the game elsewhere. What a time!
Same thing for me, Minecraft servers were part of my "social media usage" when I was younger. I like how they offered different degrees of interactions. You have basic chat and private messages, but you can also go on Skype/Mumble/etc and talk to people.
These days I kind of have the same thing with a private Discord server (5 people including me) and Twitter. My Twitter account is private, most of my friends (~10 people) are also in private. I can have a window on the "outside world" by following stuff from the outside, but interactions are limited to me and my friends.
We usually set up a new Minecraft server every year and play a lot for a month or two (most of us are still students), and having a 3D world that we can modify at will is always very special. I've thought a lot about what the future could look like for us. I have this idea of a "3D coworking space", though for now frequent Discord calls and Twitter interactions are enough. I do miss the feeling of building something together and living in a (virtual) space together. Just like it's easier to remember things with a mental palace, it's easier to remember the memories we made together while visiting our Minecraft servers.
I've heard some positive reviews about gather.town[0] for virtual co-working, though I've never used it. The demos look cool though. It lacks the creative element of Minecraft though. I'm not sure to what extend the worlds are customizable. Curious if anyone has used it and has an opinion.
I've tried FocusMate, though that is along the "match-making" model, and I didn't get much out of a random pairing for 1 hour at a time.
For me the real lack of gather.town is not the creative element but 3D. I have great immersion in 3D spaces, but really poor immersion in 2D spaces. From what I see and from my point of view, it's a very small improvement over a Discord server with multiple vocal channels.
IMO this is what a metaverse should be: just a federated game.
Actually, Open Simulator (an open source implementation of Second Life's protocol) is kind of already that, although one might debate whether it's a game and the tech is pretty dated by this point.
I can't help but think that kids today are doing something like this in their own way. And that the real thing people miss when they wax nostalgic is youth.
I see kids today doing this a lot with "Among Us", Fortnite and Minecraft still. Among us basically functions like a chat room but you can control who enters, password protect it, set rules for the game etc
Me too!
If it wasn’t for Minecraft I probably wouldn’t be where I am now. Pretty much the first time I wrote code was because I wanted to build a Minecraft mod. It was (unsurprisingly) absolutely horrible, but it was the start of a long learning journey.
Yup. A bigger point on "small social networks" that it's taken years for me to learn; I've always dabbled in the idea of social networking as its grown up, hacking together a little thing that looked like twitter before twitter for my friends, etc.
Here's the thing that may save you if you're trying to pull one of these together: You can't do it without something else. Meaning, the idea of a "local" Twitter/Facebook killer is great but (if you're me) no one will see the value and you won't be able to onboard ANYONE without some sort of "social carrot" separate and apart from the mere idea of "hey, new social network."
(This is one of those ideas that nerds like me just have trouble digesting, so hopefully it helps someone get through this. I've tried and failed this many times over. Will probably do it again :) )
Yes, but look at the audience. My elderly parents and inlaws and cousins aren't going to play minecraft. I want to give them a Facebook clone that isn't a Facebook spyware product.
I had that experience as well but with Tibia instead of Minecraft. It was essentially IRC with an embedded MMORPG. Everyone I knew played it. We'd gather somewhere to train our characters and chat. Good times. At some point I started hosting Open Tibia servers for my friends, even opened it up for strangers later. Lots of fun and was my first programming experience with C++ and Lua.
You can’t even send photos with Minecraft though. It’s certainly a social experience but in no way comparable to say, Facebook or instagram like Friendcamp in the article
If I was hanging out with a friend in person and they kept showing me pictures of other stuff in their life I'd get bored pretty quickly. If I'm hanging out with someone, I want to be talking with them and doing stuff with them, not getting a slideshow of their most glamorous recent moments.
Each to their own, I guess, but I find the normal mode of interaction on "social media" (including all that photo sharing and commentary) to be super weird and undesirable.
People don't really "hang out with their friends" on social media.
If you don't realize interactions with people are different when you are: face to face, in same VoIP call playing same game, playing same game with text only, in same VoIP but not actively doing same thing, and on a website like Facebook or Twitter there really is nothing to even start conversation on.
Yes, of course, if I play Minecraft with someone there usually no photos shared, but we probably are on Discord for VoIP and use the screen sharing function if we want to show something.
Showing pictures of stuff we talk can be pretty interesting.
Having friends show me a video of how the procedurally animated spider created walks, some crazy place they visited or how the new girl they are dating looks like isn't boring.
The advantage of Minecraft (or any other game for that matter) is that you are focused on the game. You can enjoy playing it with people even if you otherwise have nothing in common and/or disagree with their views/opinions.
When it comes to photos specifically, not being able to send media is also a huge advantage when dealing with creeps or other malicious people. Spam is pretty much non-existent in most games because you generally can't click on links, and the worst "malware" incident is typically a troll telling you to Alt+F4 to fix a bug.
It depends what you're looking for. If it's a relationship, you probably will do better looking for another medium, but for pure fun, it's a perfect setup.
How is maintaining an app on top of a Kubernetes cluster easier than setting up a Minecraft server on an old PC back in the day? Who pays for that and maintains it?
Private small self run social media already exists. It's personal Minecraft servers.
When I was younger I ran a Minecraft server out of my toaster of a PC. Friends hopped on, made their own little houses, built stuff and talked. Friends would pass in and out and in order to get in you had to be invited! I'd say max there were 10-20 people on there somewhat consistently.
It was great, and better than social media or even game for hanging out with your friends IMO because it emulated synchronous human interaction instead of just setting up feeds where everything has to be "perfect".
It was easy enough for a 14 year old to setup, and administer. Mods made it hackable and fun.
I guess the metaverse was already a thing back then huh?