Building Safer Social Spaces in the MyZubster Metaverse

In the MyZubster Metaverse, the platform is transforming from a digital plant-tracking service into a multi-faceted ecosystem that encompasses identity, communities, marketplaces, subcultures, knowledge sharing, and virtual social spaces. During the most recent development phase, a primary emphasis was placed on creating a secure and privacy-focused communication framework within this metaverse environment.

This new architecture is still in the experimental stage, functioning as a server-authoritative prototype that concentrates on validating identity, virtual rooms, sessions, permissions, social interactions, and moderation processes before being integrated into a fully-realized real-time setting.

To maintain user privacy, the platform employs MyZubster characters that are securely linked to individual accounts. These characters are identified by a unique character ID, a public character name, an archetype, an identity status, a world assignment, and a connection to a GitHub profile. By utilizing these verified character attributes, users can maintain their connection to their MyZubster accounts without revealing internal database identifiers to other participants.

The metaverse's virtual rooms operate under a server-authoritative system, where room creation, drafting, publication, access policies, room capacity, session scheduling, session management, participant membership, host permissions, private invitations, and blocked accounts are all validated by the server. This prevents users from bypassing room rules by manipulating browser state or sending unauthorized API requests.

The room lifecycle is strictly controlled, with transitions moving forward in a predetermined sequence and being unable to move backward arbitrarily. Room hosts have the ability to configure various access levels, including public, authenticated user, private, and stage access, as well as set schedules for sessions and manage private invitations.

Private rooms on the platform support expiring, single-use invitation links, which are generated securely, checked for expiration, and redeemed individually to prevent concurrent consumption by multiple accounts. Hosts can manage active room participants without exposing internal account IDs, using a moderation interface that works with privacy-safe references and public character information.

They can view active participants, remove, and block participants, inspect the room blocklist, and restore access for unblocked participants.

In terms of stage access, rooms can adopt various policies, such as host-only stages, host-approved speaking requests, pending speaking requests, or leaving the stage voluntarily. Revoking speaking access is also possible. Privacy-safe speaker lists are maintained, ensuring that stage access is granted responsibly. Room state is synchronized through resilient polling instead of relying on in-memory serverless connections, ensuring consistent updates across multiple serverless instances.

Chat messages are constrained by various factors, including room ID, session ID, verified participant access, session state, maximum message length, sanitization, and server-side rate limiting. Chat rate limiting uses MongoDB-backed shared state to ensure effectiveness across multiple serverless instances, with throttle keys generated using SHA-256 and without containing readable account IDs.

Temporary throttle records are automatically removed through TTL indexes. Participants can report chat messages using a limited set of reasons, with reports scoped to the specific room, session, message, and authenticated reporter. Reports are automatically deleted after seven days, and participants receive only their reported status upon submission.