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2026-04-25 21:34:52

silverpill@mitra.social

>I'm probably going to set it to also subscribe to a list of mitra instances daily to block

- Someone on GoToSocial

Oh cool, I didn't know there is a blocklist of mitra instances.

2026-04-25 21:45:42

Phantasm

phnt@fluffytail.org

@silverpill@mitra.social GTS user having a normal one, I've seen many requests to add software-based federation policies into GTS and also Mastodon.

There's also an easy Mitra instances blocklist if you modify Fedilist csv responses slightly, but don't tell anyone 🤫

2026-04-25 21:56:42

Saorsa

Saorsa@neondystopia.world

Mitra does look interesting, though. Was about to spin up an account to check it out when I realised it requires an invitation code.

@silverpill@mitra.social @sendpaws@mitra.pawslut.party

2026-04-26 02:49:38

caohuak

caohuak@moon.lonewolf.zone

@silverpill >Oh cool, I didn't know there is a blocklist of mitra instances.

This list isn't necessarily a blocklist, it might just be a list of Mitra instances pulled from somewhere like fediverse.observer that they've imported into their blocks.

2026-04-26 02:51:42

caohuak

caohuak@moon.lonewolf.zone

@silverpill https://fba.ryona.agency/?domain=moon.lonewolf.zone

This Mitra hater publicly blocked all Mitra instances.

2026-04-26 11:05:36

silverpill

silverpill@mitra.social

@caohuak What was the reason?

2026-04-26 12:21:57

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@silverpill Probably someone who is very staunchly opposed to blockchains, crypto and NFTs...

...vs earlier Mitra that openly advertised exactly that stuff as its own future.

To be honest, I'm not too fond of these three either.

#FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Mitra

2026-04-26 14:13:12

caohuak

caohuak@moon.lonewolf.zone

@jupiter_rowland @silverpill Based on the scattered discussions about Mitra I've seen on the timeline a few times, the current sentiment leans more toward the developers being from Poast, while the concerns regarding crypto aren't as strong anymore.

2026-04-26 21:13:46

silverpill

silverpill@mitra.social

@caohuak @jupiter_rowland

Poast was one of the few places on fedi where you could find people interested in crypto. I published project updates there until Mitra was ready for everyday use.

silverpill wrote the following Beitrag Sat, 25 Sep 2021 03:11:44 +0200

Working on #cryptocurrency donation buttons. They will appear under posts by users who added crypto addresses to their profiles using "$" notation, as pioneered by @soapbox

2026-04-26 21:36:42

caohuak

caohuak@moon.lonewolf.zone

@silverpill @jupiter_rowland media's negative portrayal of cryptocurrency and blockchain has created a stereotype for most users. I sometimes see Mastodon server rules that explicitly forbid the promotion of these materials.

tbh when i I first saw the mitra-web three years ago I thought it looked a bit weird but it wasn't a big deal.

2026-04-27 11:30:31

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@caohuak @silverpill Well, to be honest, that crypto stuff doesn't have its bad rep entirely undeservedly. It appears to be used as a cash grab or for get-rick-quick schemes more often than not.

The massive gambling with the big cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and Ethereum that causes both to be highly volatile.

Gigantic Ethereum mining farms with countless high-end graphics cards that eat up more electricity than a bigger town, often even fossil or nuclear energy because there simply isn't enough renewable energy available where they're located.

NFT hypes. Masses of NFTs that were procedurally generated and sold for insane amounts of money. See Bored Apes. They've made a few people very rich with next to zero effort. Others have lost a lot of money because these NFTs are literally absolutely worthless today.

And this is a field that I'm pretty familiar with: The Metaverse. Mind you, I'm not talking about Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads. That isn't the Metaverse. I'm not talking about "the Metaverse" a.k.a. "the Meta Metaverse" a.k.a. "the Facebook Metaverse" a.k.a. "Zuckerberg's Metaverse" either which, by the way, is actually named Horizon.

No, I'm talking about cryptobros jumping upon the Metaverse bandwagon, hoping to squeeze some money out of it.

The blueprint of this all has to be a virtual world named Decentraland which was opened in February, 2020, just in time for the COVID-19 pandemic that caused real-life social interaction to grind to a complete halt and made virtual worlds the more popular.

In fact, it was a crypto platform before it became a virtual world. In 2017 already, its own cryptocurrency MANA, which is on the Ethereum blockchain, was first traded to raise money to get the world itself started. And even as a virtual world, it's a crypto platform because Decentraland is pretty much all about minting and selling NFTs.

Part of its concept is that deeds to parcels of land are minted as NFTs and then sold. And these parcels aren't even that big. Better yet, they were sold before they even existed as actual virtual land. Basically, Decentraland sold deeds to something that they yet had to make. But they got enough customers to bite, including big fashion brands, but also real-estate companies that scooped up land to sell it with a big profit.

Users, especially right-wing extremists, created avatars with slurs for names just to mint them as NFTs and sell them for a fortune. Nothing was done against it. I mean, the more NFTs were sold for MANA, the more MANA was traded, the more volatile it became, the higher profits one could make by trading it.

Decentraland advertises itself as "the first decentralised Metaverse". This is nonsense. Yes, it's "decentralised" in the sense that MANA is not running on the Bitcoin blockchain. Yes, it's also "decentralised" in the sense of being governed by a DAO.

But the virtual world system itself is a centralised, monolithic silo owned and operated by one and the same entity. The actual "first decentralised Metaverse" is made up of the worlds based on OpenSimulator from as early as 2007. This, by the way, is where I regularly am.

It's every bit as decentralised as any Fediverse software out there. As in, you can have an avatar in one world and teleport to another world, on another server, under another domain, owned and operated by other people, appearance, inventory and all. As in, the five developers, including only one actual coder, don't own anything beyond their own patches of land.

Another aspect that makes blatantly clear just how Decentraland is a crypto cash grab more than anything else: The actual world itself is buggy as hell. And precious little is done to fix these bugs. In fact, they don't even seem to matter because Decentraland is not about spending time in-world, which is why it's rather deserted and empty, but about minting, selling and buying NFTs.

As COVID brought with itself a virtual world boom from which even Second Life could profit, crypto-based virtual world started spreading. For example, The Sandbox had already been bought out, and it came back in March as a crypto-based world.

Hundreds of virtual worlds were at least announced in the early 2020s, all copying Decentraland's concept of minting deeds to virtual land as NFTs, backed by nothing more than an announcement and a promise, before even getting started with the actual virtual world. The latter was to be quickly and cheaply cobbled together using some 3-D game engine like Unity or Unreal Engine, neither of which is really fit for virtual worlds in which users can build stuff.

The best outcome was an actual virtual world which was barely in a functional state. It only existed for there to be something backing the NFTs. Oftentimes, the financial assets behind the world were kept in cryptocurrencies, hoping that they rise in value which would create more financial assets out of nothing. But when the cryptocurrency crashed, it became impossible to pay for the operation of the world or whatever employees it had. Crypto crashes kept killing crypto-based worlds left and right. It didn't help that most crypto-based virtual worlds used existing cryptocurrencies like Dogecoin.

In many other cases, however, there never was an actual virtual world to begin with. They never got it running. So their customers were sitting their with their expensive NFT land deeds and waiting for the actual land to be made. The longer it took for an announced virtual world to materialise, the harder it got to sell more NFT land deeds because the more unlikely it became that the actual land would ever exist. If plummeting land sales didn't put an end to the endeavour, the next crypto crash did.

I think there were even scammers among these cryptobros. They, too, announced a hot new crypto-based virtual world. They, too, started selling land deeds as NFTs. But they never had the intention to actually create and launch a virtual world. They sold shit-tons of NFTs for shit-tons of crypto money. Then they waited for the cryptocurrency to soar. If they were smart, they traded it all for millions in fiat money and made away with it to someplace offshore. If they weren't, if they wanted to keep on gambling, they, too, lost almost everything in a crypto crash.

Lastly: Around 2021/2022, many cryptobros staunchly insisted in virtual worlds absolutely requiring a blockchain, a cryptocurrency and NFTs for everything. According to them, it's technologically absolutely impossible to build virtual worlds without even only one of these. This was to keep people from getting interested (and invested) in non-crypto virtual worlds.

As a matter of fact, however, there are lots of virtual worlds that don't use a blockchain, that don't have a cryptocurrency, that don't have NFTs for anything. Second Life doesn't, and it never has since its launch in 2002. And Second Life still generates more revenue per user and month than Facebook, legally even.

OpenSim doesn't anywhere. Sansar didn't. High Fidelity didn't. Vircadia doesn't. Overte doesn't. Roblox doesn't. VRChat doesn't. Rec Room didn't. (Formerly Mozilla) Hubs doesn't. Horizon doesn't. Just to name a few. Some of these don't have any in-world payment system at all.

All these blatant lies, the total neglect of the actual virtual worlds and their misuse as a money printer don't really make me trust in crypto. Neither do the rampant gambling and the volatility.

Oh, and don't get me started about land prices in Decentraland vs Second Life vs OpenSim.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #VirtualWorlds #Metaverse #TheMetaverse #Decentraland #TheSandbox #Blockchain #Crypto #Cryptocurrency #Cryptocurrencies #NFT #NFTs #Cryptobros #Cryptomining #CryptoScam #CryptoCrash #NFTCrash