social.noyu.me

“[with online text-based communication] you are always in a superposition of being alone and in infinite company“

goddamn

i personally kind of embrace text chat because it seems like the closest thing i can get to morphological freedom without… constraints that are often literally worse than “existing in the real world”, but it's also… not without its problems…

‪they need to invent a voice and spatial chat app that's actually good‬

@hikari what do you feel about vrchat

@mcc @hikari "actually good" would seem to be disqualifying criteria, but I still use it because it's where all the content / people / least compromises are

@mcc i haven't invested enough time into trying to use it to really form a full opinion of it. i feel like the fact it's so vr-centric might be the first problem. i should see how much i can make it work without first buying a vr setup

@hikari @mcc you can absolutely use it on desktop and have access to a sizeable amount of content, but the best experience will be in VR. lmk if you want any pointers

@philpax @hikari i have long desired the creation of a "2d metaverse". Something exactly 1/2 way between Gaia online and Vrchat

@mcc @philpax in some way this has been a theme of my entire life even though i haven't actually made anything in this space in several years

@hikari huh interesting, we find text *much preferable* to voice, but *only if it has the correct vibe* (which we still have yet to reverse engineer s.t. it can be explained in words)

@hikari fwiw iirc some people were poking at gather.town during the pandemic for a purpose vaguely like this, but it didn't hit the necessary magic for us to like it

@r yeah extremely i have my own hopes and disappointments with gather.town

@r i am very fond of text but i have been talking to someone who expressed these frustrations with text at me and i start to see what she means because i'm actually suffering in similar ways without really realising it

@hikari hmm, is it more about *voice* specifically, or is it about (virtual) spatial proximity which you would've gotten in MMOs?

@r yes, a key thing they indicated is that you do not know when you have company and when you do not

@hikari oh yes, that makes a lot of sense then!

this has definitely been a factor making text chat work suboptimally with <girl>, and MMOs wouldn't really have this problem