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friend.tech can be used as a lens to see how open world metaverse platforms can evolve into something people want.
At first friend.tech didn’t look like my thing but then I stumbled upon the following article:
“WHY FRIEND TECH IS GREAT (MAYBE THE BEST EVER PONZI ) 喵”
https://www.egirlcapital.com/writings/181712053
Which poses that it’s an instrument for online reputation. Being a grifter is communicated by your value going down. Being cool is communicated by number going up. Magical internet money as the indicator.
friend.tech is a graph, it doesn’t have a recognizable shape, it’s a network of holders. Discovery is most likely to happen outside of the system, social capital/clout/etc being the pathway to the graph. The importance of its shape is going to become apparent in the following section.
It’s a game where people (maybe machines too, who knows) spend money to wiggle the graph in their favor. The design seems mandated by edge maximization (price and/or quantity). Each node wants undivided attention.
A social graph is messy, a few years ago it was a big topic since APIs were abundant, every social network wanted developers to figure out ways to monetize the relationship networks.
Usually open world metaverse platforms, mostly deriving their ideas from scifi and mmos, design their systems around the idea of parcels. Usually square, with 8 neighboring parcels. Users buy parcels and build on them. An open world metaverse graph is orderly.
The promise is discovery, persistence and community.
This is the case for Cryptovoxels, Decentraland, Upstreet, and many others. It’s easy to understand and reasonable. What you are buying is not only space to build but being a neighbor to 8 other plots.
In a social graph a given node can be friends with everyone, and everyone can be friends with that node. Some even let you be friends with yourself.
Some platforms have dedicated zones for brands or try to pad things out in some form to derisk neighboring plots from tarnishing the experience or devaluing the brand, etc.
Open world metaverse platforms are explicit graphs, parcels must be next to other parcels.
This is both a feature and a tradeoff. The gestalt is the promise of open world metaverses, it makes the graph visible, it lets people become immersed and explore. The tradeoff is the burden of exposing your social capital. If you are famous enough then neighboring parcels are going to go up in price, people will try to harass or pester, bother, set up scams, etc. Like a celebrity mansion in Beverly Hills, with all the things that implies.
What are you getting out of it? It seems like a net gain for the others. It’s not like you can enjoy the virtual yacuzzi and marble sculptures from the previous owner. Your explicit graph has only 8 possible edges like any other parcel. Presence can be good by itself, as navigation is not even necessary, since deep liking is a thing.
As seen in cryptovoxels early history, and in MMO guild halls, a virtual neighborhood is a unique experience. Community building around interests and goals and the magical feeling of serendipity. Reputation happens within the context of being a good neighbor.
It seems like the geometry of open world metaverses, essentially grids, is mandated by serendipity. Scattering builds in navigable patterns.
Each node wants attention but also gains from being part of the group.
A problem arises when all neighboring plots are owned already. There’s no other dynamic than people walking into your space. The neighbor graph changes slowly or becomes uninteresting (someone buying all the plots around you).
We can’t trivially convert a social graph into a reasonable looking open world metaverse. Non determinism in layouting a graph with different approaches makes for unstable foundations. Any change in the graph would alter the spatial relationships in upredictable ways. You can play with force directed graph layouting here:
CSAcademy is a next generation educational platform. Discover computer science with interactive lessons and a seamless online code editor.
Force directed 3D layouts for exploring connected worlds was implemented by @bai0 in (at the moment of writing this) unavailable website called augmented perception. The layout was precomputed in the server.
@jin also has a prototype sh
https://madjin.github.io/3d-force-graph/example/img-nodes/
wing hyperfy worlds as a force directed graph:
https://madjin.github.io/3d-force-graph/example/img-nodes/
If you want to read about the challenges of layouting graphs you can read [ "Graph Drawing by Force-directed Placement" by Fruchterman and Reingold (1991). ] Force directed layouts are the most common approach, even though recent approaches using AI show promise.
Even if all of that makes little sense for you, the key idea I want to convey is that there’s no predictable direct mapping between a social graph and a 2D layout that satisfies everyone involved. (that I know of)
How can open world metaverses be reshaped to incentivize more edges ?
Could it be that traditional open world metaverse designs are limiting the appeal because of the grid constraint?
How can we design systems that let people see their social capital reflected in cool neighborhoods ?
Should these systems work as funnels into friend.tech (or similar) or be the guild halls themselves?
friend.tech made me reconsider the design of open world metaverses because social relationships are messy cyclic graphs. Even though social networks are nothing new, the idea of making your edges valuable, and managing that value somehow being a central part of the proposition is familiar to me in this context.
Figuring out an open world metaverse that “breaks the grid” in an exciting way is going to be an incredible discovery for internet culture. Science fiction is not all you need to design interesting real life systems and we have to be aware of the structures we are trying to force in our systems.
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