There are dozens of unofficial Minecraft-compatible clients, in various degrees of completeness: Other more recent efforts to build web-based Minecraft clients include and, both are currently quite limited, but its only a matter of time/effort to complete the implementation and not a fundamental technology limitation. Voxels are particularly attractive in my opinion due to the ease of content creation. It did not pan out, though we had some cool features including connecting to Minecraft servers, embedding web page content in a 3D space (including interactivity with voxel-webview, still working in the demo: ) and I wrote a retrospective about its successes and failures earlier this year: but it showed a lot of promise in what could be done to build a decentralized distributed malleable virtual world. Not coincidentally, I called it 'Voxel Metaverse', thinking along the same lines as you were, and had high aspirations. My humble attempt at building such a client: 'new media forms and new mediums of access (web, mobile, PCs, AR, etc.)' vs 'you can only run Minecraft where Microsoft distributes it (unless you crack/RE it)' - granted, but there are multiple unofficial efforts to develop new ways to access Minecraft servers, including through the web. Forge modders frequently enhance the protocol to support new functionality far beyond what was possible in the original game. In fact, it is specifically designed to be expanded, since the introduction of Plugin Channels in Minecraft 1.1. Regarding 'you can certainly not expand the protocol -southerntofu' - the Minecraft protocol is commonly expanded by modders. It wouldn't be too far of a leap to link together unrelated Minecraft servers. The multiverse, not the metaverse, but a related concept. To this day the 'Multiverse' plugin remains among the top plugins.

Most of the top popular 'servers' are in actuality multiple servers joined together, somewhat decentralized, though still centrally managed.Įven before Bungee, the reign of Bukkit (2010-2014) introduced a plugin API system allowing for managing multiple worlds. Since the introduction of BungeeCord in 2012 (and then Waterfall and Paracord), it has become increasingly popular to link together multiple servers to act as a gateway to different virtual worlds on different servers. Minecraft may actually be closer to the metaverse than commonly believed:

Modelbench vs blockbench