Hint: It is not "Meta's Metaverse" or "Facebook's Metaverse" or "Zuckerberg's Metaverse", officially known as Horizons

(This is an edited and upgraded version of this post.)

Starting last year, you could read it all over the place: "The Metaverse is dead." Everyone agreed, because for 99% of all people out there, "Metaverse" referred to Horizons, the series of 3-D virtual worlds launched by Meta Platforms, formerly Facebook. And as far as I know, Zuckerberg actually tried to use "Metaverse" as the registered, trademarked, exclusive brand name for his worlds until he learned that he can't trademark something already used in a commercially published novel, namely Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson from 1991.

Thus, he settled for names like Horizons and Horizon Worlds which nobody knows nor cares about because everyone still speaks of Meta's worlds as "the Metaverse". And I guess people would continue to do so even if Snow Crash was turned into a massive Hollywood blockbuster with a budget of $400M that makes $4B in theatres within the first week.

What we can take away from this is that Mark Zuckerberg did, in fact, not invent the term "metaverse".

Oh, and also last year, Linden Lab ran a massive PR campaign for the 20th birthday of Second Life which has also only recently started referring to itself as a "metaverse" to try and jump into the gap that the Horizons leave behind as Meta drops them like they're hot in favour of artificial intelligence.

Many rubbed their eyes in disbelief. Didn't Second Life, like, shut down in, what, 2008 or 2009? Because the rampant news coverage about it died down back then. Yeah, but that was because it was no longer viable for commercial mainstream mass media to have virtual offices in Second Life after what few big corporations had joined it had left again. And when journalists stopped using their avatars (said avatars are still there, only unused), they didn't know what was happening in Second Life anymore. Besides, what was still happening in Second Life was only of interest for Second Life residents, but not for casual mass media consumers.

Nonetheless, Second Life continued to exist, and it does so until today. It even developed and advanced greatly. Today's avatars look nothing like those from 2007 when the hype was the biggest and from when the most images and videos seem to have survived. Oh, and they blow everything that Horizons has ever dared to demonstrate clean out of the water while consisting entirely of user-generated content.

What we can take away from this is that the metaverse (no capital M here) is not dead, and that Horizons is not "The Metaverse" and has never been "The Metaverse".

However, between Snow Crash and the renaming of Facebook (the corporation) into Meta Platforms, the term "metaverse" was still used a lot, only it was used in places which next to nobody even knew, which are still largely unknown today. I'm talking about the worlds based on OpenSimulator, a sort of free and open-source implementation of Second Life, and its community.

To give you a few examples: Alternate Metaverse currently counts as the fifth-biggest OpenSim grid by active users and by land area. It was launched in late 2019 under this name. That already was well before Zuck implied having invented 3-D virtual worlds. And the name wasn't chosen to cash in on Snow Crash, but because the word "metaverse" had been all around OpenSim for years already.

The Infinite Metaverse Alliance is from 2016, if not even older. And it has always been all about OpenSim with two grids of its own, one named Metaverse Depot.

Metropolis, launched in 2008, was one of the first OpenSim grids, it was the first mostly German-speaking OpenSim grid, and when it was shut down for good in July, 2022, it was the third-oldest still existing grid. Its full name was "Metropolis Metaversum" for which there's proof from as early as 2010.

The news blog Hypergrid Business has given its OpenSim category the name "Metaverse". The oldest post in the category is from October 8th, 2010.

The earliest uses of the term "metaverse" in conjunction with OpenSim go back until even earlier, namely in 2007 already, the year that OpenSim itself came out. 2007 was also the year that OSgrid was launched, the first public grid and the oldest grid today. An archived copy of the grid website from November 7th, 2007 refers to OpenSim itself as, quote, "The Open Source Metaverse". It's quite likely that this wasn't even the first time that the word "metaverse" was used by the OpenSim community. Starting in 2008, OSgrid would start referring to itself as "The Open Source Metaverse", and it still does today.

Also in 2008, the Hypergrid was invented which connects OpenSim grids with one another and makes travelling between grids possible. For the first time in the history of virtual worlds, it became possible for avatars to travel between separate worlds with separate operators. Some said the Hypergrid was worth being referred to as a metaverse.

This was when it was increasingly attempted to define what a metaverse or the Metaverse is. Another idea was that "the Metaverse" refers to the entirety of all virtual worlds, regardless of whether they're connected or not. It would include 3-D worlds like Second Life, There or the various OpenSim grids, it would include 2½-D isometric worlds like Furcadia, it would include 2-D worlds and maybe even text-only worlds, and it would include out-right games like Minecraft or World of Warcraft, even if the worlds in the former are created procedurally. Basically, "metaverse" became the new "cyberspace".

And then there were those who had probably read Snow Crash and who knew what the Metaverse in that book is: a centralised, monolithic, corporate-owned walled garden. Essentially, that Metaverse was a vision of an Internet that had evolved into a 3-D world, but in 1991, the Internet itself largely consisted of corporate-owned walled gardens such as AOL and CompuServe itself, and Microsoft tried to establish its own one. That was three years before the World-Wide Web.

So while the requirement of being corporate-run and even a walled garden wasn't pursued further, "metaverse" was defined as being one single world. According to this definition, there isn't "the Metaverse", but there are many metaverses. Each OpenSim grid would be its own metaverse. No wonder not few grids actually refer to themselves as metaverses.

Sometimes, another criterium is added to the definition: It's only truly a metaverse when it's possible to move between separate locations (rooms, spaces, lands, call them whatever) by natural means. Usually, a virtual world has to be divided into smaller units, especially if these smaller units can be run by someone else than the creators/owners of the whole world. Now, this criterium means that these units have to at least be able to directly border on one another. An avatar standing near the border between two units must be able to look into the neighbouring unit. And in order to enter the neighbouring unit, the avatar must be able to walk or ride a vehicle that's actually moving instead of being a teleporter in disguise (I've seen both in OpenSim). Teleportation must not be a requirement out of basic technological limitations.

Now, imagine a virtual world that's IRC or Discord ported to 3-D just like the Metaverse in Snow Crash is AOL ported to 3-D, a world that only consists of separate, enclosed chatrooms which are built in-world as virtual conference rooms which you enter by logging into them and leave by logging out again. It probably doesn't have any windows. It definitely doesn't have a door working as such; either there is no door, or the door is decoration, or the door is the logout button, but there's nothing outside that door. If your avatar runs into that door, provided your avatar can walk and isn't bound to a chair at the conference table (yes, there are virtual worlds in which avatars can't walk around), it'll log out of that conference room and back into a kind of lobby. By the above criterium, this cannot be a metaverse.

However, if the door actually opens, and your avatar can look and walk through it into a hallway, from there into the lobby and even leave the building, then we're getting closer to a metaverse, probably even more so if the conference room is actually a separate virtual location operated by someone else than the lobby and the hallways.

Second Life fulfills this definition. You can walk around the mainland for hours, constantly crossing from one sim into another, all rented and designed by different residents, even though they all run on the same server cluster under Linden Lab' control. Sure, you can teleport, but that's only necessary if there's no other way to get somewhere. That might be because your current location and/or your destination is too remote, i.e. isolated by empty regions with no sims running in them which can't be crossed, or out of convenience because your destination is too far away.

OpenSim grids fulfill it, too, while the Hypergrid doesn't. The Hypergrid requires teleportation because it connects separate worlds and not different places within the same world. Otherwise, it's like Second Life while sometimes taking the "separate places with separate owners" part even further: Between renting land on grids and running a whole grid of your own, you can host your own sims and have them attached to certain existing grids. As a visitor, it might actually happen that you walk not only from one sim to another, but onto someone else's machine.

Still, if you look around, if you look at the various platforms that have "metaverse" painted on them, whether they're operational or only vague concepts, each one of their creators has a different definition of what a metaverse or the Metaverse is, always corresponding on what they plan their worlds to be like. Corporations that place all their bets on virtual reality claim that "pancake" worlds which can be accessed through conventional devices with 2-D screens like Second Life or the OpenSim grids can't be metaverses. Those who want to include the real life and augmented reality or mixted reality claim that this is part of the very definition of "metaverse" so that they can also deny VR-only platforms such as VRChat or Rec Room any metaverse status. At the same time, even companies that offer nothing more than e.g. concerts in virtual reality claim that their secluded concert venues make up a metaverse, too.

Corporate definitions of "metaverse" almost always amount to, "A metaverse is what we call a metaverse; all metaverse definitions by our competitors are false, they don't have/work on true metaverses." Exceptions are limited to Meta ("We're inventing the Metaverse from scratch. Wait, what do you mean, we can't trademark that word?") and Linden Lab ("We've had a metaverse before any of you even had computers. And our very own Philip Rosedale has actually read Snow Crash. Your arguments are invalid.").

Sometimes the definition of "metaverse" even goes hand-in-hand with a declaration of what makes a virtual world, and what's necessary to build and operate one. Cryptobros, for example, insist that the Metaverse/metaverses/virtual worlds can impossibly function without a blockchain, a cryptocurrency and NFTs. Others who invest in AI currently state that virtual worlds won't and can't be possible without AI. Second Life has been proving them all wrong by successfully and continually running a virtual world without a blockchain, without crypto, without NFTs and without AI for over two decades now, but they build their business model on their customers either never having even heard of Second Life or believing it was shut down before summer 2009.

The IEEE even has a scientific paper on the definition of "metaverse". No, really.

This leads us to a set of criteria for the Metaverse or a metaverse that may or may not be valid.

The first one is that it's 3-D. This is easy to agree upon unless pre-3-D worlds protest against that definition.

Persistence is another criterium. The world must not only exist on your end-user device and start up when you join it and shut down again when you leave. This is generally fulfilled. Generally because many OpenSim users run their own grids based on the DreamGrid distribution on Windows computers at home. Some do leave them running 24/7, others only start them up when they're at home and awake. And then there are those who only own one functional computer which therefore serves as both the machine they run their viewer on and their grid server. Now, the typical Windows user starts up their machine when they need it and shuts it down when they're done. So there are actually public grids that are only online when their grid owners are, even if that's only two or three hours a day. But this only applies to a limited number of grids and not OpenSim as a whole. That said, even grid servers in data centres running larger public grids have to be restarted every once in a while.

Thirdly, some make a functioning economy an absolute requirement for a virtual world to call itself a metaverse. Second Life has one that works so well that Linden Lab makes more money per user and month than Meta, all without privacy breaches. It helps that nearly all in-world content is made by users, and Linden Lab doesn't take offering free content in larger quantities kindly.

Its younger open-source sibling, OpenSim, however, which has been referred to as a metaverse or multiple metaverses would fail this definition. It's technically impossible to implement an in-world economy both with "monopoly money" and with virtual currencies that can be exchanged with real money, either grid-independently (Gloebit, Podex) or grid-specific (like Kitely or Wolf Territories handle it). But the vast majority of grids has chosen not to include any method of payment for anything. OpenSim in general doesn't even need an economy because most grids by far are run by hobbyists in their spare time. And openly for-profit grids are not only suspicious, but usually not very long-lived. In the meantime, OSgrid, the first, oldest and largest of all grids, celebrates its 16th birthday next month (I guess), and it's non-commercial and running on donations.

By the way, OpenSim also took over Second Life's set of item permissions. But since so many avatars in OpenSim have access to admin mode ("god mode") which can override them, they're symbolic at best and useless at worst.

Immersion is a point that's being debated. However, this lastly depends not only on the underlying technology, but also on how in-world places are designed. Immersion is something that I personally am very very interested in. But most OpenSim users neither know what it is, nor do they care, especially not if it stands in the way of convenience. For example, building an in-door club with no doors to the outside saves the sim owner the effort of a) cutting a hole into the walls of the building and b) scripting and configuring a door. Sim owners tend to believe that if they wouldn't use such a door, nobody would. But a building with no doors is not very credible and realistic, and having to teleport to get into it and back out is not very immersive.

If we're talking about "the Metaverse" instead of single virtual worlds as metaverses, decentralisation is of course important. Now, by this definition, everything else from Second Life to Roblox to Fortnite to Horizon Worlds is just a bunch of centralised walled gardens and not even close to being part of the Metaverse. The few exceptions are all not corporate-owned; they include the High Fidelity fork Vircadia, the Vircadia fork Overte and OpenSim's Hypergrid. The latter is made up from hundreds, if not thousands of separate grids, and very very rarely do even two have the same owner. On top of that, there isn't even an "official grid" run by the developers; lead dev Ubit Umarov only owns one standard region that's externally attached to OSgrid.

On the other hand, OpenSim entirely runs on one and the same software product. Even if various versions and even a number of forks are in use, it's only one platform and not several. And besides, how can the Hypergrid be "the Metaverse" if only a tiny minority of the grids that make it up pass the "metaverse litmus test" themselves because they don't have an economy?

Not even Vircadia could comply with this definition. It's decentralised, and it's commercial. Also, it's said to be fully compatible with Overte, so we already have two different virtual world platforms interacting. But for one, Overte is still a Vircadia fork, a soft fork even, so they aren't as different as Second Life and Third Room, and Overte messes with the economy requirement by being decidedly non-commercial at platform level already.

But seriously, debating such details is kind of futile as long as it's even unclear if it's "a metaverse/multiple metaverses" or "the Metaverse". So no, nobody has the privilege of having that one single "official" definition of "metaverse".