We hear the word metaverse a lot. But what does that really mean? It's not a singular place like Maine or Dubai, but in a similar way to how our brains think about physical places based on lived experience we each think of different mental artifacts when we think about a metaverse.
If you tell me you're going to Maine, I think of the ocean, islands, and lobster, but you might think of mountains, pine trees and rivers, both are Maine. When someone says Metaverse, what do you think of? We have had metaverses for as long as people have been writing and imagining fiction, it all exists in our minds. In 2022 we now have shared digital space that is attempting to replicate and expand on (improve on?) the physical reality we all inhabit (which BTW is pretty fucking intense and huge already - see photos from the Webb space telescope) How we use and interact with these digital arenas is something that will become more clear in the next decade or so. It's a little bit like a mirage at the moment, we keep moving towards it but it's not fully there yet and a lot of tools that will allow widespread uptake and use of what folks are calling web3 feels just out of reach.
I watch people much younger than me (I was born before Reagan was president) use and interact with all sorts of computer accessed metaverses, Roblox, Minecraft, Twitter Spaces, even terrestrial radio or a 3-way phone call is a sort of metaverse, it's not the hard physical reality in front of you.
There can never be only one metaverse, each and every one of us is part of, and manifests their own metaverse, and where there is overlap between my experience and yours, that's the value and importance of it all.