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The Metaverse doesn’t need Meta. It needs the Fediverse.

Meta has spent more than US$70B on VR/AR since 2020. Reality Labs lost US$17.7B in 2024 alone, and its cumulative losses are now over US$70B according to earnings reports. That investment only makes sense if Quest becomes a mass-market computing platform, not a niche headset. Meta has openly said that VR and AR are the next major platform after the smartphone. But Quest never hit the ubiquity that turns a device into generational tech.

The iPhone became essential because people used it constantly and its app ecosystem became woven into daily life. VR hasn’t made that leap. Most people don’t live in a headset. There’s no universally indispensable “iPhone moment” app. And even if Meta built the most polished XR experience imaginable, polish has never guaranteed inevitability. If it did, Google+ would have conquered social networking.

And while Quest hardware has improved, sales have fallen year-over-year and Reality Labs revenue remains under 1% of Meta’s total revenue. Those numbers don’t point to a platform about to reshape the world. They point to a very expensive stall and an industry precariously balanced on one company’s willingness to keep losing billions.

That’s where the real danger begins. Corporate-owned social platforms do not fail gracefully. MySpace, AIM, Google+ all vanished when the company walked away. XR raises the stakes even higher. A closed social network loses posts. A closed Metaverse loses entire worlds. The claim that “VR will stagnate without Meta” isn’t a defense of Meta. It’s an indictment of an architecture where one corporate balance sheet can freeze an entire medium.

This is why resilience matters. If you are building VR worlds, tools, communities, experiences, you need to know your work won’t evaporate because a CFO adjusted the five-year plan. You need identities that persist. Worlds that persist. A social layer that outlives corporate strategy. Convenience absolutely matters, but it isn’t real convenience if the universe you built can be unplugged overnight.

Open systems provide exactly that kind of continuity. Email never died. RSS never died. XMPP never died. These open protocols survive because no single corporation controls them—and the Fediverse operates on the same principle. That matters for XR, because any social layer meant to outlive a company’s budget cycle needs infrastructure that doesn’t disappear when the funding does.

But continuity is only half the story. The other half is scale. People often talk about the Fediverse as if it’s “Mastodon and its ~10M users,” when Mastodon is just one cluster of thousands of ActivityPub-speaking servers. And the real footprint extends far beyond it. WordPress—which powers roughly 43% of the entire web—is Fediverse-capable. Ghost is Fediverse-capable. And Threads, now with more than 400 million monthly active users, is actively integrating ActivityPub. The potential addressable market for a federated XR ecosystem isn’t 10M. It’s already in the billions—and waiting for the right applications to tap into it.

And the missing XR layer is already here: ActivityPub. Years ago, Immers Space experimented with bridging WebXR to the Fediverse. It didn’t scale then—not because it was impossible, but because everything around it was early. WebXR was immature. XR adoption was small. The Fediverse was tiny compared to what it is now. The idea was right. The ecosystem wasn’t ready.

Now the timing finally lines up. Valve’s upcoming Steam Frame is PC-first, Linux-powered, OpenXR-native, and built by a company that treats openness as a strength rather than a liability. Steam Frame isn’t a guaranteed savior. What it does create is space. Space for XR that isn’t welded to a single company’s garden. Space for developers, modders, and open-source communities to build worlds that don’t vanish when one corporation changes direction.

I see the same pattern running GoFedi, a managed Fediverse hosting service. Communities thrive when their digital lives aren’t tethered to one company’s survival. Apply that logic to XR and you get a Metaverse that behaves like the internet itself: resilient, interoperable, and impossible to kill with a budget meeting. Not instead of good hardware, but alongside it—as the continuity layer that keeps progress from evaporating the moment a CEO decides it’s time to pivot.

The future of shared worlds shouldn’t hinge on whether one corporation can absorb another US$15B loss. It should belong to the people running their own servers, building their own spaces, and refusing to let entire universes disappear because a company changed its mind.