Communication — The missing link in the Metaverse
Why the key to building a Web3 without walls is all about how we connect…
This article is Part 3 in a multi-story series delving into the depths of how we can best deliver the Metaverse that humanity deserves. To get up to speed, read Part 1 and Part 2 here.
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As I’ve explored in the previous articles of this series, NFTs (individuals) and the Metaverse (where we congregate online) are becoming the focus of the technological world.
From where we sit in the mainstream internet, a centralised environment where we chat, play, shop, interact, do business, and more, with fluid UX but without our privacy, it can be easy to take for granted what’s going on behind the scenes…
It’s easy to overlook what we are doing…
What happens every time we open an email… Send a gif… Ask a bot a question on a website… Whenever we tap the heart icon on a picture, or watch a video…
Every action is an interaction. And what we’re doing is communicating.
COMMUNICATION IN THE OLD WORLD — WEB2
It’s open information thanks to recent documentaries like The Social Dilemma and The Great Hack that big business thrives off the data of its users. Its giant centralised comms platforms are the ‘walled gardens’ of the internet, providing communications services to an enclosed herd of users who abide by their rules.
But it’s not just them, the ‘socially focused’ or very large businesses like Facebook (oops I mean Meta) that record, utilise, thrive, need the data of the users to get by — it’s every business in the internet of today — Web2.0.
It’s a problem baked into its bones.
Centralised infrastructures are the norm in Web2.0 and literally centre around a central server that is the hub for each business’s network. All information comes into and resides forever in the central server, and the central server relays all communications, whether they be a message, a call, notification, or a micro-event, such as showing that a message has been read.
Web2.0 communication across centralised networks always involves a third party, and is therefore inherently flawed and not private. Their server receives and reads all, sees all, stores all, and controls who you can communicate with and when. Not to mention, utilises this gained information about you to sell you things or change your opinion.
So coming back to communication….
BUILDING FOR FREEDOM OF COMMUNICATION
You may think a communication service like Facebook or Twitter offers freedom because you can use it to communicate without paying in dollars or cents, but the caveats you consent to around the privacy of your communication are worth their weight in literal gold. $128.290 billion of gold, specifically.
And in their world, it’ll always be this way. Because they make the rules. This is the walled garden — the individual enclave that the big tech communications businesses of Web2.0 have carved out for themselves.
In the walled garden, in order to use their communication services, you must create a profile within their network. To do that, you must first submit to their terms — the harvesting of your data and its subliminal manipulation against you and others, the acceptance of vulnerability to hackers, and not just a lack of privacy and respect for your personal boundaries, but a business model that is based on overstepping them.
Then, and only then, can you communicate with contacts that have bowed to the same rules to create a profile within their network. If the central server goes offline, your ability to communicate is gone until they turn it back on. If Facebook crashed forever tomorrow, all information, businesses, connections, and lives built around the use of its platform would be lost.
This is why the very foundations, the communications architecture of the Metaverse of the Web3.0 era must be decentralised.
Because by themselves, decentralised assets like NFTs aren’t enough — they don’t ensure that the Metaverse itself will be decentralised. But they do create an attractive new space that centralisation would love to creep into…
THE SYLO NETWORK — ENABLING AN OPEN METAVERSE
Fortunately, by positioning the Sylo Network, we are already well placed to provide the robust decentralised infrastructure that the Metaverse needs.
Autonomous, p2p, e2ee, and run by the community for the community, the Sylo Network can ensure that the Metaverse is decentralised.
What this offers the digital worlds of NFT projects in the Metaverse (or microverses as you could call them) is the ability to chat, call, video call, buy, sell, send, receive, browse, play, and notify each other with the same UX and reliability that you could expect in a walled garden, except, out in the decentralised wild.
A decentralised foundation for the digital worlds of the Metaverse = Connection, expansion, growth, freedom, and a safeguard of sovereignty into perpetuity.
This is especially important as because NTFs are permanent, they need a permanent, autonomous communications structure to support them that cannot be turned off at the whim of one big company.
The architecture that enables the Sylo Network, the Sylo SDK, has the power to connect individuals, groups, communities, and worlds.
By choosing a decentralised foundation, Sylo becomes the place where the Metaverse comes together…
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Part 4 coming soon! Got questions in the mean time? Get in touch with our team now on Twitter or Telegram, we’d love to hear from you!
Or if you’d like a refresher on the basics of NFTs, go back to our 101 guide in this article.
