Facebook mastered social media by giving people an easy way to share their offline lives with friends, family, and complete strangers on the Internet.

Over the past week, the social media company has blitzed media outlets with news about its “metaverse” initiative, a plan to create virtual worlds where people can interact to play games, have meetings, and so on.

Facebook has “a history of doing these kinds of technical projects that look like they might be revolutionary at times when they’re being criticized for their lack of social responsibility,” Jen Goldbeck, a computer scientist and professor at the University of Maryland, told Ars.

If Zuckerberg ever wanted a metaverse to escape to, where Facebook exerted influence over everything from physics to religion, that time is probably now.

Still, it’s not clear that the metaverse is the killer app for VR, nor is it an obvious evolution of social media.

Inside Facebook, developing the metaverse may seem like an obvious next step.

There are a lot of people who are like, 'This remote working is great.'” And Facebook could be the company to make it happen.

“There are people inside Facebook whose job it is to figure out what the next big thing is,” Goldbeck said.

But in many ways, the metaverse project is a fundamental shift away from what made Facebook successful.

First, Facebook is a company that tends to succeed when it iterates on existing ideas or solves genuine problems.

Even the company’s technological crown jewel, the News Feed, wasn’t created due to pie-in-the-sky dreaming about what could take social media to the next level.

It was a solution to a real problem—as people added more friends on Facebook, they were getting inundated with updates.

But it can also be true that the project serves as a convenient distraction from the problems the company faces.