These are news that will shake the fledgling virtual worlds scene:

 Ryan Schultz wrote the following post Mon, 22 Dec 2025 17:45:30 +0100 Metaverse Bombshell: NETFLIX Acquires Ready Player Me—What Does This Mean for Metaverse Platforms Using Ready Player Me Avatars? https://ryanschultz.com/2025/12/22/metaverse-bombshell-netflix-acquires-ready-player-me-what-does-this-mean-for-metaverse-platforms-using-ready-player-me-avatars/


Now, there are lots of virtual worlds and virtual world systems where Ready Player Me avatars can be used. In VRChat, it's one of the most popular options, but still one out of many. In Vircadia and Overte, it's useful because these two have no built-in support for avatar creation whatsoever, because they still have more important things to take care of than avatar creation.

But then there are hundreds of small platforms like Spatial.io that have integrated Ready Player Me as their avatar-building system. As their only avatar-building system, because the extra effort of implementing an alternative wasn't worth the time and effort for the small team or the one sole developer behind it.

[spoiler=Content warning for the image: car]



The next player to integrate Ready Player Me will be Netflix for its gaming and social VR side. However, what Netflix is going to do is swallow Ready Player Me out entirely. It will be integrated into Netflix. The whole staff will be transferred to Netflix, for now anyway. And on January 31st, 2026, PlayerZero, the cross-platform avatar-making platform launched only a year ago, will be shut down.

This means that Netflix will not only integrate Ready Player Me. It will take Ready Player Me away from hundreds of smaller platforms at the same time, leaving them with no working source for avatars whatsoever and probably no avatars at all.

Seriously, this happens when you place all your bets on one single third party.



[spoiler=Content warning: eye contact, crying, anger]

Explanation:

The images are based on the following meme templates in this order:

• Left Exit 12 Off Ramp (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/left-exit-12-off-ramp)
• Dependency, also known as Complex Structure Supported by a Tiny Part (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/complex-structure-supported-by-a-tiny-part)
• Train Hitting School Bus (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/train-hitting-school-bus)
• Soyboy vs Yes Chad, a combination of Soyjak (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/soy-boy-face-soyjak) and Nordic Gamer, also known as a Yes Chad (https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/yes-chad)

Ready Player Me (https://readyplayer.me/; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ready_Player_Me) is known for various tools for creating fairly high-quality 3-D avatars for various uses. Their name is a play on Ernest Cline's 2011 novel about a 3-D virtual world and, more famously, Steven Spielberg's 2018 film adaptation.

Ready Player Me uses a large number of built-in assets plus artificial intelligence to build avatars. It can be integrated into other platforms, it has a dedicated avatar creator for the popular 3-D virtual world platform VRChat, and it can be used to export avatars for various standards.

Among developers of small virtual worlds and virtual world systems, it is popular because it can fairly easily be integrated into their systems, giving them quick and easy access to very versatile avatars on par with characters in modern-day video games. This saves them from developing their own avatar system, including rigging, configuration and outfitting, and from designing their own avatar components or waiting for their user community to supply these.

Such virtual worlds are actually fairly numerous. The COVID-19 pandemic with its social distancing provided fertile grounds for virtual worlds which would allow for interactions without real-life social restrictions. And Mark Zuckerberg's 2021 announcement to start his own virtual world kicked off a metaverse hype. Countless virtual reality and virtual world projects were launched in its wake.

Bigger players could afford to develop their own avatar engine and avatar-building system and usually also design their own avatar components. Small start-ups, on the other hand, lack the development capacities for that, as do non-profits and free and open-source projects. Some, like the decentralised virtual world systems Vircadia and Overte, require their users to generate their avatars in external tools, convert them to something that Vircadia and Overte understand and upload them on sufficiently fast servers.

Others made use of the solutions offered by Ready Player Me to integrate it directly into their worlds. This immediately gave them an avatar-building system along with all assets to build avatars from as Ready Player Me generates them on the fly.

There are other avatar providers like Ready Player Me, but Ready Player Me is the biggest and most well-known one by far. In fact, oftentimes, Ready Player Me must have been the only one of its kind known to virtual world developers. Even if not, they deemed integrating at least one more such provider an unnecessary effort. After all, Ready Player Me did what it was supposed to do.

One year ago, in December, 2024, Ready Player Me launched PlayerZero which can be integrated into virtual worlds and the like, too. The killer feature of PlayerZero is that users can create an avatar and use the self-same avatar in all virtual worlds that have PlayerZero implemented without ever having to remake it. In fact, generating the same avatar twice over is next to impossible, seeing as Ready Player Me has always been AI-powered.

With the takeover of Ready Player Me by Netflix, the latter will fully incorporate not only its staff, but also its technology and assets and make them available exclusively to Netflix products.

On January 31st, PlayerZero will be shut down which will immediately rob hundreds of virtual worlds of their entire avatar engine. Not only will users no longer be able to create new avatars, but even existing avatars will vanish along with the entire avatar engine, essentially breaking these virtual worlds altogether.

These worlds will have to choose: Either they find and integrate another avatar engine. This would take quite some time during which the whole world will remain essentially defunct, and then everyone will have to build new avatars. Or they develop their own avatar engine and either design their own avatar assets or also provide a way for their user community to make, upload and share avatar assets. This would take much more time, and it would require people talented enough to make avatar assets. Well, or they give up and shut down, and be it because they cannot survive for a prolonged period of time during which nobody can access them because nobody has an avatar anymore.

As hinted at in the fourth image, Second Life and worlds based on OpenSimulator, both from the 2000s, have a much more resilient avatar system. It doesn't even use assets built into the world engine. Instead, avatars are built in-world from content that first has to be acquired into the inventory. With only very few exceptions, this content is made and offered by users.

##Metaverse ##VirtualWorlds ##ReadyPlayerMe ##Netflix ##SecondLife ##OpenSimulator ##OpenSim ##Meme #ImageMacro" ##Wojak ##WojakComics" ##Soyjak ##CryingWojak ##YesChad ##NordicGamer ##QuotePost ##QuoteTweet ##QuoteToot ##QuoteBoost ##Car ##Cars ##CWCars ##EyeContact ##CWEyeContact ##Crying ##CWCrying ##Tears ##Anger ##CWAnger ##Sensitive ##⚠️

Reviving this channel because I had to meme about the recent AWS outage.

[spoiler=Content warning for the image: eye contact, alcohol]

Explanation:

The image is based on the Leonardo DiCaprio Laughing meme template (KnowYourMeme entry). It has DiCaprio's character Calvin Candie ridicule the fact that the outage of Amazon Web Services, starting on Sunday, October 19th, 2025 took dozens of other centralised online service offline as well because they are hosted on Amazon Web Services.

Next to the virtual world system Roblox (Wikipedia, official website) and the massively multiplayer online game Fortnite (Wikipedia, official website), this also struck Second Life, one of the oldest virtual worlds still around (Wikipedia, official website). After the Second Life owner company Linden Lab was taken over by three investors a few years ago, the decision was made to cut costs by getting rid of Second Life's own server farm and moving the whole grid to Amazon Web Services.

On the other hand, there is OpenSimulator, OpenSim in short (article written by me that explains it, Wikipedia, official website and wiki). It lacks such a single point of failure because it is a decentralised network of over 4,000 big and small independent worlds called "grids". The biggest grids run on rented Web space, but even they rely on various providers in various places in the world. Many smaller grids are even hosted on machines at their admins' homes, ranging from purpose-built servers to off-the-shelf laptop computers all the way down to Raspberry Pis for personal grids.

It simply is impossible for OpenSim to go down in its entirety when some server infrastructure fails because it doesn't rely on one central server infrastructure.

##OpenSim ##OpenSimulator ##Metaverse ##VirtualWorlds ##SecondLife ##Roblox ##Fortnite ##Amazon ##AmazonWebServices ##AWS ##Meme ##ImageMacro ##ReactionImage ##LeonardoDiCaprio ##LeonardoDiCaprioLaughing ##EyeContact ##CWEyeContact ##Alcohol ##Alc ##CWAlcohol ##CWAlc ##Sensitive ##⚠️

I've read that Bluesky is offline. I can't impossibly not spork that. So have a double feature.

[spoiler=Caution: Images hidden due to eye contact]

Explanation

The first image is based on the "Dr. Evil Air Quotes" meme. The second image is based on the "Oh No! Anyway" meme template.

On November 14th, 2024, Bluesky's main instance, bsky.social, went offline. Effectively, this meant that Bluesky as a whole went offline because bsky.social is the one instance were practically everyone is. Hardly anyone knows that other so-called PBS's exist, and Bluesky is frequently considered to be not decentralised at all.

##Bluesky ##Meme ##Image macro ##Reaction Image ##Dr. Evil Air Quotes ##Oh No! Anyway ##EyeContact ##CWEyeContact ##Sensitive ##⚠️

Ever wondered why the "Facebook alternative" side of the Fediverse is easy to deploy and so lightweight in spite of its feature wealth?

[spoiler=Caution: Image hidden due to eye contact, crying, anger and Japanese profanity]

Explanation:

This image is a collage based on various memes.

The top row makes use of Wojaks, it basically is a Wojak comic. The two Wojaks on the right are Soyjaks, the third one from the left is essentially the same combination of a Soyjak and a Crying Wojak as seen in the Soyjaks vs Chads format. "Baka", as said by the Soyjak in the top right, is Japanese for "idiot" and hints at Misskey, as well as large parts of its target audience, being Japanese. It has become a meme of its own.

The bottom row re-uses the "Moth Lamp" meme. This time, however, "lämp", intentionally spelled with an umlaut as per the meme, does not mean a light source. Instead, it stands for a so-called "LAMP stack" which is the bare minimum Web server equipment.

• L stands for Linux and refers not to the operating system kernel, but to the whole software platform.
• A stands for the Apache HTTP Server.
• M stands for the MySQL database management system, nowadays usually in the shape of the MySQL fork MariaDB.
• P, in this case, stands for the PHP scripting language used for dynamic websites.

The three Fediverse server applications represented as moths in the bottom row, captioned with "LÄMP", are Friendica, a very powerful Facebook alternative created by Mike Macgirvin in 2010, Hubzilla, a very versatile and extremely powerful "federated content management system" which Mike Macgirvin himself created from 2015 out of his own Friendica fork, and the intentionally nameless application in the streams repository from 2021, itself at the end of a long line of forks by Mike Macgirvin again, starting at Hubzilla. None of the four have any exotic or heavy-weight server software requirements. They need JavaScript for parts of the UI, but otherwise, they can run on a bone-stock Web server, requiring remarkably few CPU and RAM resources.

The four projects in the top row, on the other hand, have more exotic and/or heavy-weight requirements.

The one in the top left is diaspora* from later in 2010 than Friendica, the only one in the image that does not support ActivityPub at all (it is only connected to the few Fediverse projects which support its own protocol, including Friendica and Hubzilla). diaspora* and Mastodon next to it are both written in Ruby on Rails. Thus, they require more hardware resources per user identity than the three at the bottom while not even nearly offering the latter's features.

Next to them, Pleroma from 2016 is famous for being much more lightweight than Mastodon while still offering more. But it is written in the fairly exotic Elixir language. Also, it can't use MySQL; it is only compatible with more complex PostgreSQL. In the meantime, Misskey, which dates back to 2014, is entirely based on JavaScript: It is written in Microsoft's TypeScript with Vue.js for the frontend. Let's say there's a reason why the former Firefish fork and now Misskey fork Iceshrimp is currently being re-written from scratch in C# as Iceshrimp.NET.

##Fediverse ##diaspora* ##Mastodon ##Ruby on Rails ##Pleroma ##Elixir ##PostgreSQL ##Misskey ##JavaScript ##TypeScript ##Vue.js ##Friendica ##Hubzilla ##(streams) ##MySQL ##PHP ##LAMP stack ##Meme ##FediMeme ##Fediverse Meme ##Wojak ##Wojak comics ##Soyjak ##Crying Wojak ##Moth ##Lämp ##Moth lamp ##EyeContact ##CWEyeContact ##Profanity ##CWProfanity ##Swearing ##CWSwearing ##Swear word ##Crying ##CWCrying ##Tears ##Anger ##CWAnger ##Sensitive ##⚠️