I never understood it. Second life launched in 2003. There's lots of elaborate MMOs to play with friends and strangers in. There's lots of games where you can have a private server for friends to play in. The market for the "Metaverse" was already totally saturated. >There's already a ton of virtual worlds but we'll make one that's more shitty, has no clear purpose for the user, and exists mostly to extract money out of people I thought maybe they could keep it propped up with funny money from the fed but other than that advantage it always seemed like a mess.