atomicthumbs

remote sensing practicioner

gregarious canid. avatar by ISANANIKA.


Website League address
@wolf@forest.stream
send me an email
atomicthumbs@wolf.observer
twitter but hopefully i only post photos there in the future
twitter.com/atomicthumbs
newsletter!! this one will let me tell you where i go
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newsletter rss same thing
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Website League (centralized federation social media project)
websiteleague.org/
Push Processing (Website League photography instance)
pushprocess.ing/
88x31 button embed code
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forest.stream (general admission website league instance)
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bluesky (probably just for photos)
bsky.app/profile/wolf.observer
this will be a cohost museum someday
cohost.rip/

mcc
@mcc

I had no New Years Eve plans this year; my wife was on a trip, my initial plans for the week fell through, I made plans for New Years Day and figured that was enough. It is okay to not be super social during a global pandemic, I decided, even if that pandemic will probably last the rest of our lives.

Still, it occurred to me maybe it would be fun to try out VRChat sometime in the evening. I booted up my headset early in the evening and verified VRChat worked; when 11 PM came, I logged on. I figured one hour would be enough time to figure out how to join an instance.

Spoilers: It was not.

Let's talk for a moment about VRChat.
A screenshot of VRChat. There is a off-kilter billboard image reading "welcome to VRChat" and a tiny frog driving a tiny taxicab.
No, back up. Let's talk for a moment about VR.

I actually like VR. Or I did at one time, and whenever I can actually get into VR and find something to experience I enjoy myself, but that's somehow become harder now than it was in 2016. In 2016 VR was a series of tantalizing, incomplete tech demos. Today VR is… actually just that same set of tantalizing, incomplete tech demos. Half Life Alyx came out, and Mare¹, so that's cool. Mostly it's the same stuff though, but harder to run because the market has fragmented and some hardware doesn't work as well as it once did.

VRChat is a tantalizing, incomplete tech demo that has actual people living in it. I'm sure you were there gawking from the sidelines last year when mainstream news became obsessed with Facebook's breathless announcements that the "metaverse" would soon become the entire digital world, and then became obsessed with the world's universal mockery and disgust of that same "metaverse", once we saw Facebook's actual product. What was weird about that whole thing was that Facebook was talking about the metaverse in the future tense, but the thing Facebook promised as the future has existed, for years, not just like conceptual antecedents like Habitat or Second Life, or dead services like AltSpace VR (I actually really liked AltSpace VR) but a working, living, actively-in-use service running on Facebook's own VR headsets. It's VRChat. It does everything Facebook promised "Horizon Worlds" will someday do and then some.

One of the things that made people like me react so negatively to Horizon Worlds was that it was too clean. Everything was corporate and sterile, every bit of friction removed even if that meant literally taking away your legs, all rendered in a joyless cartoon style that made everything look like an advertisement. If you have a long history on the Internet, or if you read the cyberpunk books the word "metaverse" evokes, you probably kind of want something that has a little bit of a feeling of being handmade and scrappy. You want a metaverse with some broken image icons, maybe a bit of Z-fighting. VRChat is the metaverse with broken image icons, metaphorically. It also definitely has Z-fighting, literally. Where Facebook's 3D-avatar chat program (sorry, metaverse) feels like it completely lacks the human element, VRChat is all human element.

This feeling is made possible by the fact that VRChat is very heavily focused on user-generated everything; user-generated content, user-created worlds, user-organized communities. As I've written before I don't think the word "metaverse" should apply to any single company's proprietary chat program, since that word inherently implies cross-vendor interoperability and freedom, but VRChat gets a lot closer to the ideal than it would otherwise simply by its choice of authoring tools: Unity. It just uses Unity. Everything you see in VRChat, every world, every backdrop, every avatar, was created in Unity, the currently-universal standard tool for ordinary game development. This means the amount of user freedom is enormously higher on VRChat than on Horizon Worlds, but also critically means nobody on VRChat is truly locked in. I'd be really nervous to make content for something like Horizon or Dreams, because everything I make is tied to their servers and how it's used, or for that matter monetized, will always be the company's choice first and mine second. But anyone who has made a space for VRChat just uploaded a Unity file, which means they can take their ball and go home anytime they want. They could take their content and reuse it in a video game of their own design. They could even take their chat area and create a tiny "metaverse" of their own, assuming they can create their own global VoIP, object persistence and synchronization client and network infrastructure².

So VRChat is pretty great, except for one drawback: It is basically impossible to step into a public VRChat space for any length of time without someone trying to sexually assault your avatar. Which is. A pretty big drawback. Kind of hard to ignore. VRChat's moderation problems are enormous and legendary³. When I first used VRChat around like… early 2017? It consisted of some company-created bland spaces and some random user content in a disorganized pile; the only consistent way to save an avatar across boots of the program, unless you manually configured Unity files outside the program, was to visit (sighs) "Trap-chan's avatar mall". I signed on, floundered in the lobby trying to figure out how to connect with a friend, and then someone came over and tried to hump my avatar while their friends laughed. When I returned to VRChat a few months ago I found a pleasant tutorial, a developed avatar-saving and friend-tracking system, and some minimal company-created nexus spaces that consist entirely of jump-pads to attractive, pleasant user-created spaces and user-created avatars. I picked out some nice avatars, explored a z-fighting waterfall, a user who in violation of both the TOS and the headset manufacturer's health and safety recommendations was definitely 12 approached me and got me to help him figure out the mobility settings, and I saw bunch of cool furries and a dude whose avatar was just a frog driving a tiny taxi. Then someone came over and tried to hump my avatar while their friends laughed.

A screenshot of VRChat. A giant skull head is sinking in a shallow pond. There is a floating 3D label: "A new world is dawning"

So: VRChat is a fully-functional, early-internet-feeling, potentially-great VR whiteboard with visible scars from repeated attempts at 4chan takeover and which feels fundamentally unsafe to exist in. Given this, I was shocked when I started looking at VRChat again to discover there's large, vibrant communities of mature, chill people making shockingly cool Internet art on it. How do they do this when the base community is a sewer?

The answer turns out to be simple: They hide.

Basically everyone you'd want to talk to on VRChat, in fact as far as I can tell the majority of the site, is hiding. I got an invite to a discord full of extremely nice furries, and this lead to an open invite to a recurring event where a bunch of nice furries stand around and hold totally normal house parties in alien nightmare geometries and/or modernist homes floating in voids⁴. Once people started showing up to these the social circle proved to be pretty big, and there are about a zillion of these social circles. You just have to have an in. You're on a Discord or something, you find out what time stuff is happening, you've pre-set up some people from the Discord on your friends list, and once people are online you tap someone who's already in the space with a Request Invite and they invite you in. There is a way to make a URL that links someone into a VRChat space, and you could IM that to someone or post it publicly. But no one does this. Even in an IM, URLs are reusable and therefore, I guess, unsafe. So everything is obsessively focused on the invite request followed by the invite. The way they make sure people are cool is that every person who enters the space was personally invited by someone already known to be cool.

This will be relevant in the story I'm about to tell. You can't just enter a VRChat space. Even events intended to be public involve misdirection, Discords pointing to other Discords, and fliers with coded language and implied access mechanisms. I think of the elaborate rituals gay subcultures used in eighteenth-century cruising routes to ensure the person they were propositioning was a fellow queer and not a police informant, except instead of trying to solicit gay sex, they are trying to have a normal human interaction. Maybe some of them have gay sex afterward, I don't know. It doesn't seem to be the focus.

December 31, 2022

So it's New Years' Eve. I have access to a Discord of nice furries, but when I pop in I can't seem to reach anyone‚ probably because they're either on some other time zone or (of course) already in VRChat. No worry; there's a channel where a bot, injected from some other corner of the "known cool" shadow community of VRChat, is spewing out dozens and dozens of high-quality flier JPEGs for NYE parties. A single screenshot of this channel would give you an immediate idea what this was like, but out of an abundance of caution about the fact I'm talking in a semi-public place about a community that's plainly going to lengths to keep itself semi-private I'm not going to post any screenshots of the Discord parts of my adventure here. However, here's one flier to give you a sense.

What looks like a flyer for a rave, such as one might have found wheatpasted in a phonebooth in the final days that phonebooths existed
(This one got posted on Twitter, so I feel OK reposting it.)

Imagine several dozen images like this, with an especially cute one featuring the girls from Dragon Maid waving a sake bottle while yelling loudly over fancy photoshopped text promising a cosplay contest. You can imagine this immediately. You've seen this genre of graphic design. It's a flier. It's essentially the same as real objects you've seen except it's designed to be distributed as a JPEG instead of printed. There's one other difference though. Although this is an advertisement, it's designed to be copypasted and reuploaded and shared, it does not anywhere explain to you how to get in to the party. It is an abstraction of an advertisement, it tells you a thing exists but not how to get it.

There's a URL at the top of that flier. It takes you to a similarly arms-length website, showing a full-page background video of a rave-looking party and linking an invite to a Discord ("JOIN. US."), a Patreon ("SUPPORT."), a Twitter ("SOCIALIZE)", and a YouTube ("EXPERIENCE."). The Twitter simply links back to the Discord. On New Years Eve I did join this Discord, and was let into one of those standard Discord landing-pad channels with over two thousand people, people constantly leaving and joining and almost no traffic except a frequently-reposted emote of a dog saying "Sup?".

"Sup?"

About half an hour before I landed in this channel, someone had asked "so, just request an invite from the bot?" and got the immediate reply "Yes!". Sorry, I asked, which bot? I never got a reply. I brought the Discord back up the next day and I think I worked out, although this is speculation, that what I should have done was ignored the text introductions channel, hopped into the voice channel, and following this breadcrumb trail from secret furry Discord to website to Twitter to non-secret VR club discord to VR club discord voice channel someone would have let me into the actual VR club. But this did not happen on this night.

This was not my evening's first attempt to get into one of the VR parties from the fliers channel. It was something like my third. My first attempt, the Dragon Maid cosplay contest I think, simply left me confused; my second, I realized the flyer had times for each DJ, and I figured out the DJ names were actual VRChat usernames, and I actually was able to work out who should be DJing right at that moment and I could look them up in the VRChat user directory and see what world they're in. I thought I could just jump from there, but no, the profiles just show you what world they're in, you can't go there except by requesting an invite. Was I actually supposed to bother a DJ with a friend request, while they are DJing? At about this point I tracked down one of the nice Discord furries and begged for an explanation of how to interpret these flyer images, and was told, and if this is wrong blame me for misinterpreting and not the nice Discord furry, but was told that yup, that's actually how you do it, yes the DJ expects it, no they don't mind because I guess the popups are worth it in exchange for the security of mind being able to control entry to the space? Anyway it was all for nothing because when I finally went to request an invite I realized that (1) they were offline, (2) I had misread the flyer and the "EST" in the time zone meant "European Standard Time" not "Eastern Standard Time", and (3) being in Europe, they had almost certainly been asleep for hours. Oh.

The closest I got to a human⁵ interaction during all this was actually here on Cohost, where @ompuco posted that they were gonna be on VRChat the same evening and invited meetups; this ultimately didn't work because their time zone is after mine and by the time they got online it was after midnight and my copy of VRChat had crashed but! looking up their profile to friend them I was able to see the worlds they'd created, which included this absolutely lovely Empty Spaces style 3D scan of a bizarrely huge house or church or something with stairs down into a seemingly endless series of junk-filled basements. (EDIT: see more here.) I paused my Discord adventures to wander around there for ten minutes, which was the most enjoyable part of this entire hourlong failure. I realized I could go up to the front door and I couldn't open it, but nothing stopped me from simply sticking my head through the door and looking at the entire scene from outside.

A low fidelity 3D model of a home office. A jumbled bunch of polygons seemingly pasted together from cut up photos of a house.

Around the time I realized I'd gotten turned around and could no longer figure out how to get out of the basement, I plunked down amid racks of bins full of indecipherable polygons and made my final attempts, with maybe twenty minutes left in the year, to get into one of these dozens of very much open, very much public VR parties whose unseelie maze of riddles and puzzles I had yet to solve for entry. I realized ShelterVR, from the flier above, had a "group" I could look up in the in-game directory, and excitedly realized this would probably link me somehow to their actual club World; but in fact

The profile for "ShelterNet" on VRChat, in the "Announcements" tab. The same information from the flier is reproduced, but no more.

That's just an alternate version of the flyer. Sitting there among the bins I made one last-ditch effort; I picked a random flier that was marked actual EST and figured out which DJ was playing at that moment. "ArcAngel". I searched "ArcAngel" in the directory. I got about a hundred results, all variants of ArcAngel, ArCAnGeL, --=ARCANGEL=-- etc. I picked one at random.

A profile on VRChat, too small to read, amidst stacks of boxes and bins.
The same profile on VRChat. A poorly cropped photo of a bear furry avatar is visible, and a bio reading only "What has the modern world become?"
(I chose not to censor this username because my entire point here is even if you try you'll never find this guy specifically.)

I failed to summon the Arcangel.

I want to stress I do not blame anyone, anyone at all, for anything that happened here except myself. My failure to log in was, in fact, the success of a social system designed (or evolved?) to make sure community members move freely but randos stay out. At that exact moment, I was a rando. I was not, in fact, "known cool". I was simply a person with a VRChat account, and that is not the same thing as an actual VRChat community member, as that community is a second, esoteric thing layered within VRChat itself and largely designed specifically to protect the community members from VRChat. I did not lose anything that hour except an hour I wasn't doing anything with anyway. "ShelterVR" did not owe me, specifically, an evening's entertainment; I glanced at some of their YouTube videos after and it seems like it was actually a pretty great party, and I'm legitimately happy for them.

I think the best way I can summarize VRChat right now is with my avatar, a vaguely gender-ambiguous twink in a hoodie that I pulled out of VRChat's random-avatar carousel when I first came back. (I'd maybe prefer something a little femmier but it's cute and I like the hoodie cloth physics.) This avatar has an expression system where if you make certain hand gestures (the buttons on the Quest controller can tell if your fingers are resting on them) it makes certain facial expressions. Mudra UI. So I figured out on my own if I stick one index finger out my avatar does a cute smile, and that's a nice convenient thing to be able to fluidly do during conversations. But there's also something that triggers a vaguely terrifying, evil grin, and I cannot figure out what it is⁶. I thought at first I just needed to look up VRChat's expression system, but no, it's not a VRChat thing in the first place, it's something the avatar creator programmed directly into the avatar's Unity file. I dug up the creator's webpage (warning, NSFW elements) looking for instructions, and I found some, but they're in Japanese, so all I really got out of this was a list of which expressions exist. So overall there's this system where my avatar's facial expressions amount to an easter egg, and I don't really want it to change— VRChat isn't quite competent enough I trust them to make a better system; and if VRChat got stomped and replaced with some sterile replacement by Facebook or Apple I doubt they'd give avatar creators enough freedom to drop in tricks like this, so I'd get nothing at all— but the consequence is that sometimes my avatar does a sinister grin entirely against my will. The system doesn't really work for me, and I thought this was happening just because I wasn't cool enough and I needed to learn how to fix it, but actually the only way to stop it is to learn Japanese so I will probably never fix it. That's VRChat.

Back in the endless VR church basement, I decided this was okay. I wanted to spend New Years Eve in VR and hey, I was in VR! I didn't really need to go to a party. I could just sit in a creepypasta church basement and count down midnight myself. Except there's one last problem: there's no way to tell time in VRChat. It's not actually part of the interface; you can't bring your phone into VR. I pulled off the headset; two minutes to midnight. Casting around for anything that would provide me with a countdown to look at I pulled up the old U.S. Government atomic-clock site time.gov which, in a final indignity, failed to load. As I tried to figure out what was happening, my computer clock ticked over to 12:00 AM, 1/1/2023. About three minutes later, somewhere in the distance, I heard quiet fireworks.

- - - - - -

¹ By the way: Play Mare.

² Or if they can figure out "Mozilla Hubs". But that other thing sounds more likely honestly.

³ This is wildly understating the problem. The site's biggest period of expansion is said to be the "Ugandan Knuckles meme" period, which all I've been told about it is (1) refers to Knuckles the Echidna (2) alarmingly racist (3) result of a 4chan invasion. I was coincidentally not using the service at this time and I'm honestly happy I have never found out exactly what this was.

⁴ I was initially skeptical how this (the VR meetups) would be better than a chat room; I was interested to try a novel experience but I expected it would pretty much feel like a Zoom call, and I frickin hate Zoom calls. But the one time I did manage to successfully join a meetup I could immediately see the attraction. Aside from it giving me a fully functional house-party dynamic— something I have not really got to experience in over three years at this point— there is implicit "technology" in the way people talk and interact in groups that you literally never notice until you have it taken away and then given back to you. You could always tell who was talking to who because of who you are facing, and the terror of real-world eye contact is lessened if you're talking to a frog. Discussions naturally split and re-formed as people having side discussions pulled away into separate circles that then attracted their own people, you know, the way people normally do when they're standing in a room, and people negotiated the formation and dissolution of these circles without even thinking about it, it just happened naturally as people turned to face the person who was saying the thing they found most interesting. VRChat even seemed to have some kinda sound-cone technology, which I may have been imagining, where you could hear someone more clearly if they were facing you than if their back was to you, so you could easily hear people in your own standing circle but were not bothered by the sound of the circle next to you. I came for a novel experience and to witness the entertaining glitching of a technology that isn't quite all there (which I definitely got. Something I had no room to discuss in this post is that the Quest version of VRChat is fundamentally not able to render many of the things the PC version is, so about 50% of the users in the room were seeing themselves as a completely different character model than the one I was seeing, as my headset reverted to their most recent Quest-compatible model. This lead to especially hilarious results in the case of someone who was in their own world using a giant Big the Cat style model but for me was appearing as a six-inch-tall fox) but by the end it was just oh, I'm at a house party with a bunch of furries. This is actually really nice. (The weirdest part: One of the biggest factors in the party's Mood was the fact that, as mentioned above, being in VR meant it was impossible for any of us to use our phones. The weirdest paradox of VR right now is that VR means being literally inside a computer but once inside there is no way to use a computer.)

⁵ Sergal?

⁶ This is slightly a lie because I actually did figure it out after writing this paragraph, when I went back to take the screenshot linked there. I now realize that what I thought was the "stick out one finger" gesture is supposed to be a peace sign, and the evil-grin gesture is to lift both hands off the buttons to make a "grabby-hands" gesture. So in fact these are more like full-body gestures, like a peace sign where you're smiling or a grabby-hands where you look nefarious. Okay, whatever. I'm not rewriting the paragraph

pinball
@pinball

the one time i intentionally went into a public world was to fetch a friend new to vrchat to let them know to not be in a public world and to accept an invite from me. they were in the fur hub, and while i was telling them this two children upstairs were being loudly transphobic

but it's an integral part of my social life now, and despite how toxic the public instances are or can be, i love all the time i spend with friend and friends of friends and friends of friends of friends. i encourage others to try the game and do my best to help them meet good groups of folks so they never need to go to a public world.

all that said there's also this, which is more correct than you can know:

The weirdest paradox of VR right now is that VR means being literally inside a computer but once inside there is no way to use a computer.

it feels like living in a small town on the railroad where news comes in rarely and is spread by word of mouth, it's not uncommon that we'll be in vr for a few hours and someone who has freshly logged in asks "so did you hear about x?" or "so and so celebrity died" and we're the ones out of the loop, despite being more "online" than most.


atomicthumbs
@atomicthumbs

vrchat is one of the few things that reliably keeps me off social media, and it's a social activity with my friends. i have concluded it's good for me

edit with pictures: plus where else are you gonna find glorious bullshit like a friend becoming enormous in order to play pool with eight people who have become pink cats and assembled themselves into a stack

edit: 56k warning. those pictures are huge PNGs but I'm leaving them in place for now for the sake of a bug report about the blurry thumbnail scaling


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @mcc's post:

folks who have fully custom avatars, or avatars based off a publicly available base or one they've purchased, have the ability to add addons and systems to their avatars

one popular class of those is a watch. sometimes the watch is multifunctional. usually they're only visible to the player, not others.

on one of my avatars i've added a size scaling system, which is very useful around furries. i'm considering adding VRClens, which is a much fancier camera. i don't have a watch yet and for now i just look down at my phone through the hole from the missing nose seal on my headset, or open the SteamVR desktop view to look at the computer clock

it's still amazing to me that they added the functionality of so many mods in after the mess last summer, but somehow "having a clock" wasn't meant to be. if I'm using the quest client, which is basically only for testing for me, I bring up the oculus menu on the right hand on pc I just use xsoverlay on my left wrist. it checks just like a watch would, but yeah, not sure if I really should have to bring another program into this still...

For a watch, I use a Steam VR plug-in called OVR Toolkit to handle that - which can also project a desktop window into VR if needed as well.

But I would not have known about it if I hadn’t gotten in with the right group.

Y'know, I actually used a similar StamVR overlay app extensively for controlling/chatting with Twitch streaming in VR back around 2017— but now I've moved to Oculus gear, so as far as I know I can't do that anymore! :(

Ah yeah, if you’re using the Quest version of VRChat specifically then I don’t think there’s an option there (at least not officially, possibly with sideloading? But it’s not an avenue I’ve explored).

I use the Quest’s Air Link to connect to my PC, and from there launch SteamVR and then VRChat from there - a lot of friends have avatars that just aren’t Quest compatible or hang out in worlds that aren’t available on Quest.

Hooboy, yep, there's a lot of hiding. A lot of my usual crowd has drifted away from vrchat lately so it's hard to social (hi, I'm zip~ btw) which makes it challenging. I think my regular crowd was pretty good at hanging out in public worlds and having low patience for children, which is how i stumbled into having a regular crowd in the first place. Anyway, yeah, I quickly learned to (a) not show avatars for people I've not friended and (b) if they're even slightly annoying, block on sight. It's a damn shame that socially maladjusted children are the main obstacle to the real vrchat experience being out in the open.

Regarding the gesture/expression system, there is a toggle you can use to turn it off completely. It should be in the "Action Menu" which you can enter by holding down the regular menu button. ( https://docs.vrchat.com/docs/gesture-toggle ) You can also toggle a HUD element which will display the hand shape you're currently making so you can see if you're accidentally making the wrong expression, or turn on a personal mirror to directly see your face as a HUD element.

These options are rather quite far from ideal of course. You can't selectively disable certain expressions as far as I'm aware, and they're hidden in the Action Menu which the game doesn't telegraph the existence of at all. I suppose the expectation is that if you're getting involved enough to care about expressions beyond that, you'll upload your own avatar (probably purchased from booth or ripped from a game).

Great write up, you really nailed what the experience is like for newcomers and the why/how it's currently like that.

Right right, it's just, I don't want to turn the expression system off. I want to use it. But even now that I've figured out how to avoid grabby-hands, I still only know two of what appears to be, from the Japanese-language website for the avatar, something like 16 expressions.

So it seems like the public version of the avatar that you're using (I tested it myself on that avatar just now) only has seven expressions (not counting the default). Each one is toggled by each type of hand shape VRchat lets you make (by default) on either hand.

The version of the avatar on booth does say it has 15 expressions and those probably are technically part of the avatar you're using; but they haven't been associated with a vrchat controller in Unity for the public upload, so there is no way to use those shape keys in game without uploading the avatar yourself with your own gesture setup.

This page should show you how to make each of the seven types of hand shape which will correspond to an expression on Quest. https://docs.vrchat.com/docs/touch

Unfortunately this is currently the full extent of what's possible in-game, without your own upload.

This used to be one of like two websites it was impossible to DDOS!! You could test your Internet connection by bringing up CNN or time.gov because those were the two sites that were always up. I guess it's not 2000 anymore.

oh hey, two of my friends actually DJed Shelter's NYE party! Unfortunately, you tried to join one of the most notoriously difficult live VR raves to join, on probably the busiest night it has ever been. To be able to get in, you would have had way better luck having somebody who's been to Shelter before giving you all the instructions on trying to join. The last time I went, there was a specific user you had to friend request, and then you had to refresh your social tab over and over again until his status went from Do Not Disturb to Join Me. If you were quick enough on the draw, you got let into the main instance where the actual DJ was on stage, with a lighting tech controlling the concert lighting on a square in-game controller. My first time, i was lucky enough to have a couple friends help me, who were actually the exact two DJ's i mentioned earlier, but at that time they were merely attendees.

Your assessment of these partially-open-to-the-public parties is correct; many of these social functions are made to be inaccessible to the common Public VRChat Worldhopper, so people who actually want to attend the event can enjoy the event without random strangers popping in and causing a ruckus. Unfortunately, it seems to be rather difficult for new people interested in these parties to actually get into said parties because of the new methods of joining semi-private instances you would have to learn as a new player. beyond that, many parties are also extremely popular - just like ShelterVR - and when the instance hits the hard cap of about 85 people in the room, you can't really get in even if you knew all the steps of the process.

It's a really unfortunate situation because ideally you'd want to allow as many people as possible to access these kinds of parties so everybody could have an awesome time, but unfortunately there are just way too many obscene, immature trolls hopping public worlds to make that kind of experience feasible without dire consequences to the patrons. Beyond that, the instances would IMMEDIATELY fill up with many people in attendance who didn't even know what they were joining into, and likely get confused by the immediate framerate tank they'd receive because Unity is trying to render nearly a hundred unique avatars updated numerous times per second with real-time full-body animation.

I can certainly understand the frustration from wanting to feel included in a VR party and ending up with a bunch of hoops to jump through. That's why i tend to watch the Twitch broadcasts of the events unless I have the spoons to get through the process of joining the instance. For what it's worth, Dieselworks is a bit of a smaller club where you have a better chance of getting into their club. It's worth looking into, if you'd like to get a taste of the VRC Rave scene without too much headache. (this is not a guarantee though, VRC is still kind of a headache in general lmao)

sorry you had such a trying time. i definitely recognized a lot of the friction points you ran into from my own VRC dabbling. in particular, i too noticed with bemusement the super vague nature of VR event flyers and their related website / social infrastructure. it can really be a mystery what is going down* and how to actually jump in.

what i ended up doing is joining like 20 VRC social-related discords, some for events and some for just established (public) groups of people ("GrownHub" "Ancients of VRChat" etc.) the latter public groups' events are very easy to join, no mysterious flyers or secret handshakes. that's one way to dip a toe.

as for the flyers, i generally manage by getting on the event's discord and looking for specifics as to what bot or event organizer to request in-game invite from. once or twice i've had to ask in discord chat. when an organizer has a generic name that results in lots of in-game hits i usually resolve that dilemma by trying to avatar-match from discord + looking at people's bios, which tend to mention projects they are involved with.

anyway don't mean to get too explain-y there.

there is one pretty regular low-key event i've gone to a couple times, weekly "world hops" hosted by this affable person named Rickity. they tend to be on Saturdays and over the course of an hour or two everyone group-tours a series of worlds the organizer has selected for being interesting or curious. it's been a nice way to get practice talking to others and to just get out there a bit more.

in case that sounds of interest here's an invite to the "Explore VRChat" discord Rickity organizes their world hops on. (also feel free to DM me on discord if you'd like, i'm novae# aught niner three aught.)

*97% of the time, to my chagrin, it is yet another dance music rave. my single best experience in VRChat to date was when i lucked into attending a live jazz show, it was fucking incredible.

I've only been using/going through VRChat with other people and I don't think I ever saw or met anyone who was like "yeah joining a public instance will go well". I say that but we did do it once by mistake and just ended up running into a guy not understanding the avatar system and we helped him and it stayed at that.

That said I can't help but wonder if this is even "fixable" as a problem? Like, clearly a multi billion tech behemoth like Facebook still can't do moderation at scale over text content and i don't expect them to be remotely successful in their Horizon Worlds thing. Maybe it's because I only very briefly knew anything pre-late 2000s Internet but it feels like Online is so big (in terms of number of people using it) that... any public space will be invaded by bad actors unless you dedicate significant resources to work against that? Maybe a company who doesn't have to prioritize engagement for profit might do a better job?

Idk where I was going with this lol

Maybe one way to look at it is that a Discord is not really a "public space", and the way Discord deals with moderation is by not having public spaces (IE, moderation is devolved on smaller communities by dint of the smaller communities being the only thing). However, Discord servers are generally easier to get into and work with than a VRChat community; they do not close themselves off as sharply as VRChat spaces seem to need to. It might be harder to moderate a VR space than a chat space, but maybe there are ways (technical or other) to bridge that gap.

VRChat is certainly one of The Places On The Internet. One of my friends got into it towards the beginning of the pandemic, and it's since become a pretty major part of their life. At one point, it was almost all of it.

They're a main host at a club, the Discord server for it has about 2k people in it. They met all their partners in VRChat. They spend hours working on their avatar, dressing it up in different outfits for themed club parties (where dressing it up is painstakingly deforming meshes to fit the body, modifying textures, adding spatial metadata that tells the model how to deform when joints move, etc).

It's not my scene. I can't get over how weird it feels, conceptually, to spend so much time in VR that you start feeling people touch you. On your tail. A body part that you don't even have. There is a part of me that can't shake the feeling that it's unhealthy to be so invested in a world that isn't "real," to spend so much time occupying it. To feel that a collection of triangles shaped like an anime girl is as much your body as the one made of meat and stuff.

I try not to think about it too much, because while my gut may be right about it in the extreme, it's almost certainly a bad impulse to condemn it all. Especially when my rational mind sees that my gut is effectively making an appeal to nature, and to follow that to it's conclusion would mean disavowing my own transness. And that philosophically, VRChat is assuredly as real as anything else. Besides, it's my friend. And they seem happy.

I can't get over how weird it feels, conceptually, to spend so much time in VR that you start feeling people touch you. On your tail. A body part that you don't even have.

therians, on the other hand, have conceptually opposite feelings about this

i would imagine so, yeah. ik lots of other trans people use vrchat to be able to inhabit a body that feels better, but since there isnt HRT That Makes You A Dog, i can imagine vrchat is like entirely indispensable for some therians. at least until we make bonkers cybernetic tails. (i am not a therian, i dont know if thats even something the average therian would want? idk if it's like being trans in that one might have dysphoria, but being trans myself it's like the closest reference point i have)

Oh hey, this is about my experience with VR Chat! I really, really wanted to enjoy VRChat and find a community and figure things out, I swear i did.

Then i realized I couldn't just... find a community on VR Chat.

I'd have to find a community elsewhere, something I'm very bad at doing, get into a group within that community, rise to the level of trusted, and then eventually I could probably VR Chat with furs with common interests.

I'm bad at social stuff, I'm bad at group situations, I'm bad at being vulnerable or being seen.

I literally can't find the communities I want to belong to outside of VRChat, so I gave up.

It really feels like I missed the onramp for VRChat when I was homeless on the streets.

Gosh, VRChat feels quite difficult to get into sometimes, especially for an introvert. I feel I was a bit lucky when I started getting into it, I had several friends who played regularly and with a few different groups.

One of the best experiences I've had in my life was in VR. I joined a dance party that was part of a friend's birthday party which included a live DJ. I graduated from being the wallflower I typically was into what people there later described me as a "hot dancer." Hearing the complements after I was dancing for about an hour straight was surprising, and certainly welcome. I've been wanting a similar experience again.

But before looking for such an opportunity again, I wanted to recreate my bunny fursona Lacey for the third time and escape the uncanny-ness people seemed to feel from the second version. I was too embarrassed by it to dance in it at the time. And it took a long time to study and hone my craft and I think I can say I'm really good at Blender at this point. I finally made a model that I felt was at the same time very much "me" but also looked really good.

But one of the worst things about being a creator in VRChat is having to deal with Unity. The other worst thing is having to deal with VRChat's SDK for Unity and it's historically poor documentation. This, I suspect, is a big part of why there are so many things in VRChat that seem janky and incomplete. Sometimes these imperfections are charming but other times they are annoying and disappointing. It's hard to feel creative and enjoy the process when the process is so terrible, inconsistent and confusing. But I might leave that for an entire other post later because I think it is important to understand how important it is to making the creator's life easier when your whole model depends on an active creative community.

sorry we didn't end up hanging out (kept crashing on my end as well, definitely should have just been testing before going on at the last minute), but I am glad you ended up going on an enriching journey like this one!

My own new years was definitely a bust as well, just sorta wandered around alone without a plan as the clock ticked past midnight. Would definitely like to do this again some year, but like... with an organized group or something at least. Exploring places new places like this with a group is definitely a wonderful experience, though going solo still has a pretty good vibe too.

Oh, hey, I recognize that bizarre house! That's a place in Louisville, KY (my hometown!), that went up for sale a couple of years ago. They had one of those virtual tours on Zillow, and it went viral. It had once been used as a church (among other things, I think). Cool to see the effort taken to preserve the exploration experience in VRChat!

This is very tangential to your post, but the VR church place you found yourself in is a internet thing that brings me joy.

The weird VR church scan you stumbled into is from a Zillow virtual tour for 8800 Blue Lick road. It got a little Twitter infamous, there are people who speedrun the Zillow tour interface for the place. https://waxy.org/2020/10/the-house-on-blue-lick-road/

I can't vouch for the veracity, but there's a Reddit comment that dug up info on the place https://www.reddit.com/r/RidiculousRealEstate/comments/ji850k/comment/ga8pqmk/

hahaha on the one hand I really want to wait on VR until tech that isn't going to immediately go obsolete is here, but I know I'm missing out on some stuff this way lol, thank you for sharing

It's been years since I sold my oculus. I was SO excited to try VR chat since it's the spiritual successor to worlds chat which was a VRML app I remember from the late 90s.

VRChat was mostly empty back when I had one (2nd gen Oculus) my experience was primarily exploring the worlds people created.

and yet again i am getting angry at how dogshit vrchat is for me because i have SEVERE social anxiety issues especially around using voice chat and am on desktop and i cant even find how to use the text chat that SUPPOSEDLY exists because the desktop support in general is an afterthought at best (ui designed for vr controllers is just annoying with a mouse and keyboard) and this all piles onto my hatred of Discord in general (UI is dogshit, too many annoying alerts that are on by default, having to /talk to people/ to even get into a lot of servers)

I am turning into a shut-in and anything that might possibly help even a little has horrible accessibility problems and it makes me very depressed

I'm really not good at discerning when people I don't know are venting about how bad something is (and vrc's bad menus somehow got... worse, after the menu overhaul?!) or if they actually wanted a fix, but the chatbox is available on the "R" key radial menu, under Tools on the left side of it. When it was first released I feel like you specifically had to enable it, but I'm not seeing any dialogue related to that. Relevant display options are available in the Launch Pad settings tab, Esc -> gear on the bottom right -> bottom set of options, above the debug info.

I'm kinda bad at explaining how to do stuff (you might have noticed this) but I'm always happy to try to help. There are definitely active participants in my circles who are in desktop and don't speak, so I hope this is something that can work for you if you want it to!

When it was first released I feel like you specifically had to enable it

Sending messages is available by default, but non-friends have to opt-in to see text chat for some reason

don't have much to say about the community stuff because I just VRchat with friends I already know from outside VRchat (which is a blast)

but with newer avatars, you can pop up an expressions menu and pick your expression from that. came with Avatars 3.0, I think? the same menu also allows avatar creators to define all sorts of toggles and animations that the user can trigger. all the avatars in the default list are old as heck and don't have any of those features, though

This is super interesting to read. I've been wanting to get into the VRChat community a ton, and meet nice people, but between my PC being old (Running a GTX 1060 still in 2023) and not wanting to support Meta, and having 0 alternative way to get into VR cheap, it's been a big hurdle.

I'm also pretty socially inept as I've mostly kept to myself for ages in part due to my mental health. I'm hoping by the time the Quest 3 comes out there's a alternative that works, I just want pcvr that isn't super expensive, potentially requires a new router, or potentially requires a very large room. I don't mind playing games on low settings either.

I'm strongly reminded of Treehouse, the hacker-sub-metaverse in Tad Williams' Otherland.

There you also have to be invited by a known cool person to find out how to enter next time. Iirc the TH "inhabitants" move the entrance periodically and can enter from anywhere, naturally.. When the protagonist enters TH i think it is via a rope ladder in some boring Database system xD/// i should reread OL

TH is also alot like cohost in the way that no other site allows you so much leeway in CSS. In TH you wouldnt neccessarily have a fixed up or down across the world like mandated on the regular VRnet along other hijinks (like multiple people being represented by one ava... or rather highly interacting avas that can merge into a "cloud of activity" ... or something [the monkeys])

And alot like VRC of course, with its user generated unity-content.

Im sorry you couldnt find a party to join, but it sounds like you did have fun, so thats nice :D

in reply to @pinball's post:

have they changed how the trust system works, such that it's possible to upload avatars in (not a buttload of hours) without ever having entered a public world? because last I had checked, public worlds are how you fast track that, and that means having to be very careful what worlds one goes to, to cut down on how annoying randos can be. I get that sense of "rescue," but the company seems to want to encourage people to stay in public until they "prove themselves."

i would imagine so yes! because i and so many others we've met and helped join in vr have never spent any length of time in public worlds before getting the ability to upload

in fact one thing we do often with those who are new to vrchat and need to build trust rank is help them fast track it with the tricks we've learned.

  • first is making friends, those in our group are often willing to friend someone new to the game who is chill when they meet them.
  • second is making them the instance owner, by walking them through making a portal to a new instance of the same world we're in, or to the world we go to next and letting them load in first, vrchat counts all the time we all spent together as time in "their world"
  • third is just time, but with having our newest folks make friends and make worlds for us to hang in, we've speedrun people to upload capability in a single night before (and also seemingly sped one friend's world they published from the 'labs' to live, in a single night as well)

interesting! sounds like it's weighting time spent with others in a world instance they "own" pretty heavily then. I'll keep this in mind; maybe I need to see if I can get a big train going so a friend of mine who's behind on getting out of the Visitor pit can get to the fun bits faster. thanks for the info here!

Speaking from personal experience, instance 'ownership' isn't a requirement either - I ended up getting upload privileges in a little over two hours of playtime just by hanging out with friends in large (but private) instances in general.

I've found that even after I've gotten the "in" to some friendly groups full of folks I enjoy hanging out with, the lack of context behind private instances discourages me from trying to join most of the time. Since all it shows is Private, I dunno if it's a truly private thing, or just a regular meet, and the friction to get set up just doesn't feel worthwhile half the time... especially when it seems like my invite requests get missed a good third of the time, or I end up wrong and requesting off someone who's actually just on to do their own thing.

I mean, I get it, it keeps the trouble out. I just wish I had a way to tell what was going on sometimes.

it certainly isn't inviting to see everyone with "User is in a Private world" and for most it doesn't create the thought "look at all these friends I can join"

it's different for different groups, but generally the best i can suggest is that you'll find some who are on more than others, and ones who tend to be the instance owner more than others, are often ones you just toss a join request and you'll be in in no time

Been a bit since I got on VRC and won't lie here I only kept things as just me going in there in private/invite only worlds cuz I just am heavily nervous in public or around people;

Small hangouts are just how I roll and I tend to just prefer being with people I know a lot else it's just having me nervous

Still going around as my sona is just trippy in itself, it's fun stuff when with right folks

in reply to @atomicthumbs's post: