How does Meta come off as both shocking and unsurprising at the same time?

On one side it's cringy af but on the other, it's certainly signaling big horizons for web3. This massive rebrand from the corporate social network tech monster many of us hate and some of our family members still love certainly feels like a gigantic shift in the space, but is it a good one?

Facebook is positioning itself to not be obliterated

The metaverse has been here and for OGs it's been years.

However, it seems we've been getting bullish news every single day—from Coinbase launching an NFT marketplace, to Mastercard's adoption of crypto services, to Adobe's new features to support NFT verification, and so on.

Facebook's big change is simply just a part of them catching the web3 wave before they miss it entirely.

More people will be onboarded into web3 principles and foundations

Being the biggest social network platform worldwide shy of 3 billion active users, Facebook's move is bound to introduce millions of people to the metaverse. At what capacity and with what values, only time will tell but mass adoption is coming.

We're building towards decentralization regardless

With decentralization as one of web3's core values, it's difficult to imagine if Facebook's 'Meta' will be a pain in the ass or just completely irrelevant. Best case scenario is that we can ignore them; worst case is they've given us a common enemy we'll have to fight against Ready Player One style.

Either way, we're gonna keep working hard to build towards a verifiable, trustless, and permissionless decentralized internet.

While we take time to process and also scurry to figure out if we need to rebrand 'metaverse', one thing is clear is that the future of the internet is here.

This micro-essay is 007 of #ship30for30 challenge.