this post was submitted on 02 Feb 2025
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Growing up I used to play aqworlds and it was super common in my online friend group at the time for everyone to host their own private servers on their own websites, once I got into the fediverse and webhosting again, I was reminded of it and it got me thinking how cool it would be to have a browser 2d mmo where people hosted their own servers.

Is there a game that implements activityhub at all? Like where server chat can be read and sent from something like mastodon.

I realize this is a stretch and something like this doesn't make sense or exist, just curious.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 hours ago

Back in the day, I used to play the online text-based MMORPG Urban Dead and really enjoyed Nexus War, a fantasy War-in-Heaven game inspired by its success that a lot of the UD players hopped over to.

In theory, this kind of system would work well on the Fediverse as overheads are relatively low and the instances could represent different "lands".

A quick ponder on this suggests some kind of portal fantasy that gives you access to these "lands" as you would struggle to define a map with instances arriving and, probably, dropping out.

  • High fantasy - a bit like Age of Sigma has its "realms" but they are all on a similar technological level. Perhaps have each realm overseen by a particular god or pantheon with a certain ethos, aesthetic or technology (Steampunk dwarves, magical woodlands, etc). You could probably keep everything balanced by having core sets of weapons or skills with added flavour and modest variation in stats (so you could have summoners who would have a set amount of summoning points and could either get one big thing or multiple small things - so an Ent or some Saplings, zombie Hill Troll or horde of zombie rabbits).
  • Multiverse - where each instance represents a different "Earth" that has developed in it's own way. Balancing technological systems would be hard as cyberpunk tech would trump Steampunk which would cause problems for Barbarians but Torg managed to do this as hi-tech kit would often break in lower tech worlds.

Something like that. Each instance would work on their particular setting and it could be fun for existing Fediverse instances to come up with a "land" that suited them - db0 would have to pirates, feddit.uk could go Steampunk, SLRPNK could do something... well the theme is pretty clear.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 hours ago

Vircadia is a kind of VR mmo that is federated.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 17 hours ago

That would actually be really cool. If there were a federated mmo, I’d play it. Well play it assuming it’s fun.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 16 hours ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

I think this just makes hyperlinks that lead to fediverse servers open in the user's preferred client, falling back to the browser.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

There are decentralized MMOs but I dont belive any of them federate

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

I'm trying to figure out what that looks like. So you mean they're just peer to peer? I'd be interested to see one of those, sounds cool.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 hours ago

He probably meant private servers. WoW has tons of private servers, for instance.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Veloren is in pre alpha, but it looks like anyone can host a server. I have only been playing it a little and still unsure about everything. It does not use Activity Pub so it is not federated, but it is decentralized.

There is a small community for it. [email protected]

And it is available on Windows/Linux/macOS.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

Federation of servers has been extensively discussed for Veloren, but the problem is that player characters are currently tied to the server they are on (contrary to player accounts) and that the developers are concerned about the potential havok to the simulated economy that players moving between servers could cause.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago

I started single player, but recently decided to try multiplayer and was surprised I had to create a new character. And as I was thinking about it the economy did come to mind.

Maybe something like FFXIV could be done where you can swap servers, but unlike FFXIV you cannot buy/sell/trade?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

Second Life?

Everything is hosted locally and created by the players. It works on BitTorrent tech to send and receive the data of objects and shit.

There are also players run emulated servers for older MMOs like Ultima Online, EverQuest even WoW, making it somewhat decentralized. You're not forced to actually subscribe to and play on the official servers (if they even still exist).

[–] [email protected] 8 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (2 children)

Second Life? Everything is hosted locally and created by the players.

Did you mean ~~OpenGrid~~ OpenSim? Second Life is not hosted by anyone but Linden Lab.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (1 children)

I'm just talking about the content in the case of Second Life. It's distributed through BitTorrent, which was one of its selling points at launch.

Though at this point, it might have emulated servers as well.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 15 hours ago

That's fair.

And not that I'm doubting your claim, but this is the first I hear of it; Do you have any sources for SL content being p2p? It would explain why it so regularly breaks.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Oh wow are you talking about OpenSimulator and hypergrids like OSGrid? I haven't thought about those in years, I had to look them up again.

As I recall: people reverse-engineered the Second Life communication protocol to make a library to interact with it. Then they made their own viewers/interfaces. Then they made their own second-life-like servers/worlds. Then they made it possible to connect those worlds in grids. This was all open source. I haven't been following them for a while though.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 15 hours ago

That's about right. It's also stuck in time, a decade behind SL.

But they've figured out how to do federated grids, which is cool.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 17 hours ago

There's been talk of linking Luanti servers with Stargates. I'm not aware of anyone having a working mod for it but it should be doable.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

Are there any fediverse games at all?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

Not really AFAIK. It's a hard thing to create because ... how do you stop people from just saying they have max levels and joining any other server with max levels (?)

You can do the private server thing but the federation of them is where things get messy because different operators could set different rates of gain on different materials and have different standards on what's considered cheating.

If you don't have that shared state... Arguably any game where you can host your own servers can be a federated mmo.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

I think the way to make it work is to have each instance represent a "world" and you only have stats and equipment within a world. Then when you cross over to another instance you are now subject to that instance's ruleset.

It wouldn't be so much a federated MMO but more like a large variety of games connected geographically (in the virtual sense).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 hours ago

At that point, it wouldn't be much different from games that simply allow anyone to host their own servers

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 hours ago

One method could be to have a replay system, public state snapshots, and publicly logged inputs. Servers could randomly audit federated peers by replaying small segments of their logs, and defederate/broadcast that there is a problem if the end state doesn't match. This would require them to be running the same code and not use arbitrary mods, but different settings would still be possible.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 18 hours ago

Does fediverse plays pokemon count? Lol there's a mastodon account where you vote for the next move of a game of pokemon gold

[–] Apathy 4 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Mention of AQWorlds and private servers? What year is this! Were you a lurker or member of the CE forum or Stylin-on.me? 😉

[–] [email protected] 2 points 14 hours ago

I was posting when I should've been lurking lol, half my posts/comments as a kid are gibberish

[–] [email protected] 3 points 21 hours ago

You could try adding AP support to an OSS MMO like eg., The Mana World