social.noyu.me

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

goddamn

without going into too much detail my life for the past year has been alternating between having no physical company usually and having semi-permanent physical company, alongside the usual text-based communication superposition, so this hits rather hard. maybe text is bad huh

‪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