Since I learned that the EU and Germany have been running official Mastodon servers for a while, and have recently been joined by Netherlands, I'm hopeful that this initiative might be a catalyst for an open and interoperable system. Details are pretty light though in the article, and it sounds like mostly establishing regulations. Still, if those regulations are structured well, there could be an open and interoperable "Metaverse" (whatever that might mean).

"Metaverse"? isn't that already dead lol

Metaverse IS Big Tech 😂🤣🤣🤣

I just watched folding ideas video essay about the metaverse (focused on one company, but I think many of the points would hold up for any metaverse thing)... And I think there's an important point - the metaverse is (so far) ill defined, but the "prototypes" I've seen are basically 3d chat rooms (that existed in the 90s) and sort of Second Life style services. Which, just... only appeal to a very small group of people apparently. VR tech still isn't there, and I'm starting to think it might be awhile (we must be on v3 of a big launch by now, right?).

Lost opportunity to invest in the Fediverse instead. Open a mastodon account for all European institutions, maybe ask the Countries to do the same for their entities. Mastodon was created in Europe, by the way. Also it’s open source, and this is a huge benefit over Meta/Twitter.