Notices by Chris Trottier (atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org)

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.

Valve isn’t just the biggest force in PC gaming, and they’re not just the newest console manufacturer swaggering into the arena.

They’re morphing into something far bolder: the Apple of Linux.

If you’re not a gamer, that might sound unhinged. Maybe even a little deranged. But if you’re already deep in the Steam ecosystem—if your library scrolls so far it needs its own municipal transit system—you know this isn’t wild at all. It’s practically destiny.

Let’s rewind. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he didn’t reinvent the wheel. He just drew a big cross on a whiteboard and said: four products. iMac, Power Mac, iBook, PowerBook. Four neat squares. Four clean market segments. And everything Apple built slotted neatly into that grid.

Apple didn’t suddenly leap to 30% marketshare. They barely scraped 3%. Didn’t matter. Because the money wasn’t really in the hardware. It was in the ecosystem.

Buy a Mac and suddenly you’re buying OS upgrades, iLife apps, office software, music tools, the whole glittering Cupertino starter kit. That stack of software made the hardware profitable, and that hardware made the software inevitable. The loop fed itself.

Now fast-forward to Valve. Look at what they’ve assembled.

Four core hardware pillars:

• Steam Controller
• Steam Deck
• Steam Machine
• Steam Frame

Four segments. Four use cases. Four doors into the same house.

Already have a PC? You grab the Steam Controller.

Want your library in your backpack? Steam Deck.

Want it in the living room? Steam Machine.

Want it strapped to your face? Steam Frame.

And the moment you buy any one of these, something interesting happens: the rest of the ecosystem starts making sense. Buy a game on Steam and it works everywhere. Your save files carry across devices. You can stream titles between them. The more hardware you add, the smoother it all feels, and the more the ecosystem pulls you deeper in.

But here’s the part I really want you to notice: I didn’t say Valve wants to be the Apple of gaming. No. They want to be the Apple of Linux.

And that’s where this gets concrete. Their hardware ships with Linux that isn’t locked down or lobotomized. It has a real desktop environment hiding under a slick UI.

Which means Valve can evolve SteamOS in ways Apple never aimed to with macOS. Apple built a general-purpose OS that occasionally supported games. However, Valve built a gaming OS that can naturally branch outward into media, creative tools, and productivity. “Gaming-adjacent” doesn’t require a conceptual pivot. It’s the next logical step.

What might that look like?

• A native media center built directly into SteamOS—think Plex or Jellyfin, but officially blessed and seamlessly integrated.
• First-party creative tools that take advantage of Proton and GPU acceleration—video editors, music tools, asset creators.
• A productivity layer—file syncing, cloud storage, collaborative apps—that piggybacks on your Steam identity.
• A SteamOS app store that isn’t just for games. Apps, utilities, editors, streaming clients, the works.

They’ve already dipped into this with Big Picture Mode’s media features, Steam Link, Steam Input configurators, desktop mode on Steam Deck, and Proton opening the gates for thousands of non-gaming applications. Nothing stops them from extending that further.

That’s why Valve—private, secretive, and small enough to fit inside an Amazon lunchroom—is still one of the most valuable forces in the entire industry. Not because they sell hardware like Apple, but because they’re building an ecosystem like Apple. Except this one runs on Linux.

If you’re a PC gamer, none of this is news. But if you’re outside the gaming bubble and this future arrives exactly how I’ve described, just know: it didn’t come out of nowhere. You just weren’t looking in Valve’s direction.

Oh God. Jack Dorsey just cannot help himself.

First he bankrolls Bluesky. Then he sprints into Nostr. Now he’s resurrecting Divine, the spiritual successor to Vine.

Maybe—just maybe—we stop orbiting another billionaire’s hobby app and support @loops instead.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/12/jack-dorsey-funds-divine-a-vine-reboot-that-includes-vines-video-archive/

I’m fully aware the Metaverse isn’t happening.

No one is strapping on a headset to telecommute, and the Quest was never destined to be the next iPhone. It was a fascinating experiment that revealed something fundamental: most people don’t want to live or work in a digital diorama.

A few years ago, VR had all the hallmarks of a classic tech bubble. Money poured in, breathless think pieces declared the dawn of a new digital civilization, and a small army of “visionaries” appeared overnight. They weren’t building a future—they were chasing funding rounds.

The idea that we’d all be buying land in virtual suburbs and decorating our walls with NFTs felt absurd then, and looks even more ridiculous now.

The truth is, that hype suffocated VR. It buried the medium under expectations it was never built to fulfill. But now that the hype has evaporated and the opportunists have migrated to AI, VR can finally breathe again. It can go back to what it was always meant to be: a creative frontier for gaming, exploration, and presence.

VR was never supposed to replace reality—it was supposed to expand imagination. And with the noise gone, it finally has the space to do exactly that.

RE: https://atomicpoet.org/objects/cf3d66f7-9c43-4c1a-ba92-c9e8a3797dbd

People who don’t game often underestimate how pivotal video game tech really is. So let me put the Steam Hardware Announcement in perspective:

• Google, Amazon, and Nvidia all tried to make game streaming happen. None succeeded. Valve probably will.
• Google, Dell, and Lenovo all tried to make desktop Linux mainstream. None succeeded. Valve probably will.
• Meta, Microsoft, and Apple all tried to make VR happen. None succeeded. Valve probably will.

Why? Because Valve has already built the ecosystem to make all of this work together—and I know this because I use it every day. Valve doesn’t just innovate. They integrate.

Take Proton. Before Valve got involved, running Windows games on Linux was a nightmare. Now it’s practically plug-and-play. And once Windows games run well on Linux, Windows apps follow suit.

Or take streaming. I’ve been streaming Windows games to my Mac through Steam Link for years. It’s not flawless, but it’s given me an unmatched game library that Apple alone could never deliver.

And here’s the bigger picture: Nvidia may be the most valuable company on Earth, but what built their empire wasn’t AI—it was games. GPUs first became essential because people wanted to play Quake and Half-Life.

Now we’re entering a new phase. All those overhyped, half-forgotten tech ideas—streaming, VR, desktop Linux—finally have a shot at mass adoption. Because the best way to truly validate new technology is to make it work for gamers.

RE: https://atomicpoet.org/objects/241674a2-db80-452c-ab18-f871043c7c26

Bazzite Linux just did a system update.

You know how that happened? It told me one was available. That’s it.

I chose to install it. I chose to reboot.

What it didn’t do was hijack my machine or interrupt my work.

Here’s my point:

Bubbles don’t pop when the smart money rotates within the sector. They pop when the smart money rotates out of the sector entirely. We saw this in 1999-2000: The warning sign wasn’t Cisco investors buying Oracle. It was when institutional money started fleeing tech altogether.

Right now? Everyone’s still playing musical chairs inside the AI room. Nobody’s heading for the exits.

We’re not in the “seventh inning stretch.” We’re probably in the fifth or sixth inning—still mid-game, not late-game. The escalation chapter, so to speak.

The bubble thesis requires capital leaving AI. But capital is just reshuffling within AI. That’s a rotation, not a top.

RE: https://atomicpoet.org/objects/5df57a3a-978a-4326-bbb4-197d8da3cf10

Stop everything and watch this.

I told you I’d drop CPL Final highlights, and yes, I meant it. Atlético Ottawa vs Cavalry FC was chaos turned into sport. Epic, unhinged, unforgettable.

And the wild part? The highlights still undersell it. You don’t feel the 40 minute snow-plow delay. You don’t feel the blizzard swallowing the pitch. You don’t feel the constant panic of a game that refused to calm down for even one second.

This was the most intense soccer match of my life. Burned into memory. If you like sports in any form, you need to see this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O56wF0Sf4DU

RE: https://atomicpoet.org/objects/b3a1216a-a99a-4d31-bc54-3ac3fb073cd2

Snow soccer should totally be its own sport.

It is entertaining as hell.

RE: https://atomicpoet.org/objects/2efcad0b-e226-4256-9abf-522972dc2d02

NASDAQ dropped 1.90% today because OpenAI’s CFO said the magic phrase that makes markets soil themselves: “a government backstop”.

That was enough for traders to assume OpenAI was already knocking on the government’s door like a neighbour asking to borrow sugar at 2AM.

Altman denied it. Friar walked it back. David Sacks swatted it down. Didn’t matter. Once investors decide an AI bubble is inflating, they treat every stray quote like it’s the final chapter of the Book of Revelations.

OpenAI is private, so nobody knows whether they’re thriving or duct-taping GPUs together in a bunker. The only visible truth is that even suggesting government involvement detonates public confidence. And yes, the optics look like a distress flare even if the intent was “long-term financing strategy” rather than “please save us”.

If this ever did blow up, Microsoft would take the first punch. Retail investors would get the meme version. But Big Tech won’t collapse because one lab fumbled its messaging. This whole reaction was vibes, not data.

Then again, hype cycles feed on vibes. And OpenAI just handed the market a buffet.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-ceo-altman-denies-company-is-looking-into-government-bailout-202255408.html

This one’s personal.

SpaceHost isn’t gone yet, but it’s winding down. It made the Fediverse accessible to so many—and we didn’t want that to fade.

So @rjbasitali and I are building @gofedi: a fully managed Fediverse hosting service for Mastodon, Pixelfed, Misskey, Akkoma, and PeerTube—with more on the way. Our goal is to eventually support every major Fediverse platform.

The first newsletter just went out. A new beginning.

RE: https://social.gofedi.com/users/gofedi/statuses/115487053664209448

Ultimately, an Xbox running full Windows is a win for Linux.

Why? Because it pushes PC gaming on a TV into the mainstream. And once that happens, people will start realizing something obvious: “Wait a second—I could just build a small ITX PC, install Linux, and get better performance than an Xbox.”

That’s already the story playing out with the ROG Ally. The hardware’s there, the software’s catching up—and Linux keeps closing the gap.

RE: https://atomicpoet.org/objects/4ce539b8-9c21-455e-a976-fae4c0462643

@aral That’s a fair take, and honestly, I get where you’re coming from.

I don’t dismiss the threat—you’re right that climate collapse could unravel far more than we realize. But what gives me some hope is that same stubborn human pattern: even in the middle of catastrophe, people organize, adapt, and find ways to rebuild.

I don’t think optimism means pretending things will work out on their own. It means believing that enough of us will keep trying, even when it looks impossible.

@aral I get that—and the threat is real. But for the entirety of my life—nearly 44 years—I’ve been waiting for the nuclear holocaust to happen.

It hasn’t.

I’ve now lived more than half my projected lifespan under that same shadow, and the world’s still here. Not because it can’t happen, but because, statistically, most of us will die of natural causes before it does.

And I suspect you believe the same—since it’s highly unlikely you’re posting this from the safety of a nuclear bunker.

The Fediverse is too full of doomerism.

So let’s be honest—the track record for doom is awful.

Most of the time, betting on collapse is a losing game. Not only because it becomes self-fulfilling, but because history shows that progress wins out more often than not. I don’t say that as a naïve optimist. If anything, doom should appeal to me. I’m a contrarian at heart.

But history tells a clear story. Every generation has its prophets of collapse. Sometimes they’re right—but those moments are rare, and the people making them usually go broke waiting for vindication. The rest spend decades yelling “doom!” while the world keeps quietly getting better.

And even when the doomers do have a point, they still get it wrong. They underestimate how stubborn we are. Humanity is basically that boss fight you think you’ve beaten—until the health bar refills. We adapt, improvise, and claw our way out.

The Great Depression didn’t fix itself. People built safety nets, reformed banks, and rewired their economies. Inflation has flared up again and again, but institutions learned how to keep it from spiralling out of control. Energy crises forced innovation in how we produce and use power. Even the 2008 financial meltdown—supposedly the death of capitalism—ended up proving that markets can mutate fast enough to survive almost anything.

The doomers weren’t wrong about the threats. They just underestimated how fast humans learn under pressure—and how innovation always sneaks in through the cracks.

That’s the real story. Humanity’s defining trait isn’t blind optimism—it’s resiliency. We stumble, argue, and procrastinate, but when the stakes get high enough, we build, fix, and adapt. We don’t survive because the future is guaranteed—we survive because we refuse to stop creating it.

And that resilience isn’t abstract. It’s personal. It’s the person rebuilding after a layoff. The worker starting over when an industry collapses. The founder trying again after failure. Markets may crash, but people keep reinventing themselves. I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it.

Still, zoom out beyond the latest crisis and the long-term picture is hard to ignore.

In 1925, most of the world didn’t have electricity or running water. Life expectancy was under 40 in many countries. Roughly 80 percent of adults were illiterate. Today, more than 90 percent of the global population has access to electricity. Over three-quarters can read and write. Global life expectancy is now over 70. And we carry supercomputers in our pockets with access to the sum of human knowledge.

Over the past century, humanity has endured the Great Depression, a world war, a Cold War, oil shocks, recessions, pandemics, and nuclear close calls. Every time, someone declared it was the end. Yet each time, we adapted, rebuilt, and moved forward.

Just within the past 20 years, more than 700 million people have escaped extreme poverty. Infant mortality has fallen by half. Deaths from infectious diseases have plunged. Despite everything—pandemics, wars, climate shocks—global living standards continue to rise.

And still, doom sells.

To those convinced the end is near, I’ll offer the same challenge. If you’re that certain, short the entire economy.

Most won’t, because unless you’re among the rare few who get it exactly right, betting on doom will ruin you.

The cat’s out of the bag.

I’m co-founding @gofedi, a new Fediverse hosting service—based in Canada, with all data hosted in Canada.

My co-founder is @rjbasitali, formerly of @spacehost. He’s moved on from SpaceHost to build this new venture with me.

We began working on it back in August. And today, it’s officially out of stealth.

RE: https://social.gofedi.com/users/gofedi/statuses/115413479620916112