Community is at the heart of our civilization. Nowadays, our communities are becoming more and more digital. The idea of a metaverse is that our online lives will one day evolve into a fully digital reality that we all share. This shared virtual world would be built on top of the blockchain, and it would allow people to create new kinds of social spaces and experiences. We have already seen some early experiments in this direction, with projects like Next Earth, which allows users to trade virtual land and build resources on a digital replicate of Earth. There are also many other projects exploring similar ideas for video games, social media, and other applications. In this article, you’ll learn about building communities within these metaverse platforms themselves. These communities can be very important for individuals and society as a whole, but they will only thrive if they have good governance structures in place. Why should we care about community in the metaverse? The internet has given us unprecedented amounts of information at our fingertips, but it has not done much to improve our ability to cooperate with each other or solve collective problems together. In fact, research shows that people are lonelier than ever, all while we’re facing greater challenges than ever before, including “extreme” and “unprecedented” climate risks to humanity. A lot of the work that must be...
