I've been thinking about MC's mod community as I recently picked Minecraft back up for a couple of days, and just how impossible any of it would've been if Microsoft had owned the property from the outset. MCP would've been C&D'd in a matter of weeks and that'd've been the end of it. Today, while MS has mostly left the existing mod community alone, I'm sure they wouldn't be friendly to someone who created an intermediary server that allowed the different MC platforms to interact, especially as they enabled this feature only for Windows 10 machines<->Mobile in June.
> Let's hope this becomes Minetest's time to shine.
Yes! I've been waiting for this forever. The first time I ran Minetest on a crappy laptop years ago it was as smooth as butter and I couldn't help but think, "Why is no one playing this?!"
I think the primary reason very few people play Minetest is because of marketing and piss poor default gameplay. If you just run Minetest without adding any of the (nearly built-in) mods you'll get an odd-looking Minecraft-like world stuck in "creative mode" (which is boring). If, however, you take the time (lots of time) to fiddle around with it and put together a collection of decent mods it becomes a good game!
The fact that it is written in C and has a proper modding API (in Lua!) should be drawing people in like crazy but for some reason it isn't.
This is actually an opportunity. Minetest is free software (LGPL). Someone needs to fork it, put a little bit of polish into it, load some mods into the default distro, and publish it as "MinecraftKiller v1.0" in a mass-marketable, easy-to-install fashion. Console ports would also be ideal, as they were instrumental to Minecraft's success.
I think in theory this is Voxeland's selling point - it's meant to be Minetest but with an actual, out-the-box game experience that doesn't rely on mods.
Cool, I didn't know about Voxelands. It is, however, apparently still GPL licensed, whereas Minetest relicensed to LGPL a few years back. I also don't think a fork is really the right direction here; Minetest needs distros that come pre-bundled with all the fun stuff, not split communities and duplicated effort.
Let's hope this becomes Minetest's time to shine.