Hi all,
I speak for everyone when I say THANK YOU, our alpha users, from the bottom of our hearts. You folks are the smart and brave ones willing to take a chance on fragile, naked, and sometimes just a little bit ugly, software. Investing your time trying out a new platform is taking a gamble with your most precious asset, your attention, and yet so many of you stuck around and had faith enough in what we were doing to join us on the march to beta.
We, seriously, are indebted to you.
You’re right, @Adrian, regrettably, and we sure could have done a better job of communicating this to you. We know the road to this point has been bumpy, and there’s been a couple of times where major shifts in design jarred some folks & their expectations of the product. I guess in some ways, that comes with the nature of having what really began as an R&D oriented startup. I suppose by Beta we mean we’ve finally nailed down the MVP, the heart of High Fidelity, and have brought it to a state that we think is presentable enough to invite the broader public to participate and try it out, since you, the amazing and insightful alpha users, have helped us to improve and enhance the software to get it to this state. Still, it’s far from perfect, there’s certainly bugs, plenty of friction points, and we can do a better job of listening to your needs. Decisions to sunset what are, arguably, popular and desirable functionality (users, text, places), have been hotly debated (internally & externally), and will probably continue to be, but we expect to see an ecosystem of clever alternative solutions emerge.
There’s a lot of ways to describe our mission statement. For me, it’s that we’re trying to make the metaverse we’ve dreamed of, inspired by our collective imagination, human creativity, our desire to push computer science in bold new ways, and perhaps taking also from visionary writers like William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Earnest Cline. We’re trying to manifest that fictional dream into something real… and what a privilege it is, to really do it. As early homo sapiens, it was a huge step to use mathematics as a tool to understand the physical reality around us. Now, as technologically-empowered humans, we shall use mathematics to not just understand, but to make new realities, or something a lot like them. Whatever will become of it, we don’t really know, but we’re here to do it because there’s something about our species that urges the brain and heart to create.
High Fidelity is designed from its very core to be a living, growing open-source platform, and we hope it’ll be flexible enough to serve your expectations, to continue to invest yourself in furthering it along. Thank you, from ALL of us, for your passion, your patience, your attention and energy.
We hope you’ll stick with us and continue to apply your ingenuity, creativity and intellect to make High Fidelity the metaverse platform of your dreams.
