“It reminds me of the feeling when Netscape first added JavaScript to the web.” So says Matthew Hodgson, the creator of the Matrix network and now building a web-based metaverse client called Third Room. He believes that he has cracked the solution to create user-generated content (UGC) for the metaverse.

I first came across Hodgson’s work last August, when I profiled a decentralized chat network called Matrix that aims to provide an alternative to commercial instant messaging (IM) products like Slack and Meta’s WhatsApp. Since then, Matrix has continued to grow: it now has 72 million users on the Matrix network (total, non-active users) and around 100,000 servers. The network is “about tripling in size every year,” according to Hodgson, in an interview with The New…