@The Nexus of Privacy

About point 2

I don't use the Fediverse for microblogging anyway. I never came from Twitter to Mastodon. I've never been on Twitter, and this identity of mine has never been on Mastodon or anything else geared towards microblogging first and foremost. I've tried Mastodon, but after many years on Friendica and Hubzilla. And this series of comments took me four or five hours to write and largely re-write, and I touch-type on a full-size hardware keyboard. That's nothing in comparison with how long it takes me to describe an image, but still.

Thus, I don't post that much anyway. And I only repeat (= boost) what I really want my own contacts to see.

On top of that, again, I don't post about real life. This channel is not about real life.

Even then, I know the Fediverse is a minefield. At the very least, I'm treading on eggs almost whenever I post something or comment on something.

I can't possibly know all instances of me being racist or sexist or misogynist or homophobic or transphobic or even only ableist. And believe me, I know that it's impossible for me to describe my own images in a way that isn't ableist to someone. The only way I don't have to throw some group of disabled Fediverse users in front of the bus when describing my images is by not posting the images in the first place and then not mentioning that I could have posted an image.

In fact, chances are that the portraits of my little in-world sister @Juno Rowland I want to post on my specialist OpenSim image channel @Jupiter Rowland's (streams) outlet are disturbingly sexist, maybe enough so to either call for the "moderation" on the (streams) instance to take action or, if that fails, have the whole instance Fediblocked. Every single last one of them with no exception. Or if not all of them, then at least some of the outfits she wears. How am I supposed to know beforehand?

Or maybe I'm racist already for only having white avatars. Never mind that having a Black avatar as a white user is every bit as bad as Blackfacing, and never mind the OpenSim doesn't even provide the means to build convincing Black avatars in the first place.

Considering all this, it doesn't even matter that I've delegated posting portraits, memes and the like to two separate (streams) channels rather than doing it on Hubzilla because (streams) can make Mastodon blank sensitive images out, and Hubzilla can't. It doesn't matter that I've done so to be more inclusive towards people who are easily triggered by certain visual content such as eye contact.

(That's me trying to be intersectional here. You've written yourself this is not only about Black people.)

(3/7)

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #FediMeta #FediverseMeta #CWFediMeta #CWFediverseMeta #Fediverse #Twitter #Mastodon #Friendica #Hubzilla #Streams #(streams) #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #Avatar #Avatars #Blackfacing #Homophobic #Homophobia #Transphobic #Transphobia #Ableist #Ableism #Sexist #Sexism #Misogynist #Misogyny #Racist #Racism

@theregicide What is what?

Yes, I was partly talking about #SecondLife of which many are absolutely certain that it was shut down in late 2008 and 2009 when it'll actually celebrate its 20th birthday this year. And no, it doesn't look anything like the crummy and choppy old video footage from 2007 anymore.

But what I was mostly talking about is something called #OpenSimulator, #OpenSim in brief.

For those who do dare to tap/click on links and let them open in a Web browser: the official OpenSimulator website/wiki; Hypergrid Business: "What is OpenSim?"

For everyone else, I'll explain it right here: OpenSim is a server application that's the basis of a big network of 3-D #VirtualWorlds which are very similar in technology to Second Life. Thus, the name "OpenSimulator" is also used for the whole ecosystem.

OpenSim was developed around the Second Life Viewer API ("viewer" = "client" = the desktop app which you use to visit Second Life and OpenSim worlds) after Linden Labs had made their own viewer open-source in 2006. OpenSim itself was launched in 2007. It is free (BSD license), open-source, non-commercial and not owned by a corporation; instead, it is developed by volunteers in their spare time.

I've already said, "network of 3-D virtual worlds" which implies there isn't only one. There are many. They're called "grids" because they themselves are split into so-called "regions" of 256x256m; it is possible to walk (or drive or ride a scripted vehicle) from one region to another without teleporting, though.

OpenSim is fully decentralised, much like Mastodon and the other Fediverse projects. And in 2008, a feature called the #Hypergrid was introduced. It created the federation between OpenSim grids which made it possible to have an avatar registered on one grid and still teleport into a wholly different grid. It's even possible to pick up content on one grid and take it to another grid; like Second Life, but unlike many modern virtual worlds, OpenSim has an inventory.

While Second Life has only got one grid, the stats on Hypergrid Business count over 420 public grids. The stats recently submitted by the DreamGrid distribution which bundles OpenSim with an easy-to-use Windows point-and-click interface count over 10,000 private and public grids; most public grids aren't based on DreamGrid, though. More than 95% of all grids are connected to the Hypergrid.

In spite of its age and being largely unknown, OpenSim is not only large, but still growing. As for land size (which, by the way, is not measured by actual dry land, but by active regions), in the latest stats, only the 40 largest grids count 108,112 standard regions and thus measure 7,085 square kilometres or 2,737 square miles. 38 of them are connected to the Hypergrid, still counting, 106,175 standard regions and measuring 6,958 square kilometres or 2,688 square miles.

OSgrid, the first OpenSim grid and both the oldest and by far the largest OpenSim grid, counts 26,885 standard regions alone which amount to 1,762 square kilometres or 681 square miles. This is only slightly less than Second Life (27,741 standard regions, 1,818 square kilometres/702 square miles).

One reason why OpenSim is so huge is because it has some of the cheapest land of all 3-D virtual worlds. Especially some crypto-based virtual worlds sell patches of land which are smaller than a Second Life/OpenSim standard region for millions of dollars.

Second Life and OpenSim generally don't sell land, they offer it for rent. In Second Life, a standard region costs from about $250 a month upward.

On the Hypergrid, most grids charge you $10 a month for a standard region, some even less than that.

Better yet: Unlike Second Life, OpenSim has "varregions" which consist of multiple regions behaving like one with no borders between them, always arranged in a square. If you rent these, you get land for even cheaper. @Lone Wolf, owner of the #WolfTerritoriesGrid, the second-largest grid by land area, charges a little under $30 for a 4x4 varregion (that's the equivalent of 16 standard regions or a bit more than one square kilometre). Varregions can grow up to 32x32 AFAIK, and 16x16 have been seen.

Well, and of course, you can always start a grid of your own.

There is no "official" grid, by the way. The core devs don't run their own grid; in fact, the lead dev only owns one personal region on #OSgrid.

It's also worth mentioning that the term #metaverse has been used around OpenSim for much longer than most people have even known it. While I don't have records about it, the Hypergrid may have been referred to as a "metaverse" as early as its own inception in 2008; maybe even OpenSim itself was called that as early as 2007. The Infinite Metaverse Alliance has used that word in its name since it was founded in 2016.

There are even grids with "metaverse" in their names which predate Mark Zuckerberg's "metaverse" announcement by years such as the IMA's own Metaverse Depot or Alternate Metaverse, established in 2019.

Essentially, OpenSim with its Hypergrid is the free, open, decentralised, distributed "metaverse" which several initiatives are currently working on creating from scratch, all believing nothing like this had ever been done before.

And it is all that without a blockchain, without a cryptocurrency and without NFTs.

CC @bdonnelly, in case you can't believe that this exists.

@Ryan Schultz Yes, two classics.

@David Farnell Around 2006 and 2007, there was that huge #SecondLife hype. It was all over the place, all over mass media. What #TheMetaverse tries to become now, Second Life really was back then. Big real-life brands went into Second Life, also hoping that they could harvest some of the residents' hard-earned Linden dollars.

The latter, however, never really came to pass. People didn't want to buy virtual remakes of Nike shoes, also because they probably weren't that close to the originals with the limited possibilities of 2007 anyway. They rather bought from in-world brands.

So the big corporations saw no point in investing into Second Life any longer, and they withdrew. With them went real-life news agencies so that news from inside Second Life broke away due to a sudden lack of reporters.

Eventually, the mainstream forgot about Second Life. Most people now believe that it must have shut down when the constant stream of news ended, i.e. around late 2008, early 2009. This includes most mainstream media, some of which don't even shy away from outright claiming or at least implying that Second Life has actually shut down back then. Five seconds on Google (as if mainstream media used any other search engine) could prove them wrong, but they are so firm in their belief that they can't be bothered to verify it.

And if mainstream media teach people that Second Life is dead and gone, both #Metaverse companies and the general public believe in it even more. People generally only learn about Second Life still being around when someone mentions that it is. Metaverse companies ignore it altogether instead of learning from it. Even if they do find out that it actually still exists because one Philip Rosedale says so, they still ignore it because they can't for the lives of them imagine that a 20-year-old virtual world has seen any innovation in the last 18 years or so.

@Aereyn This has happened to lots and lots of people.

They left not too long after the hype had ended. Then, many years later, they learned that Second Life is still there. They still remember their password or manage to retrieve it from somewhere. And they log back in for the first time in many years, of course expecting little to nothing to have changed because it feels to them like Second Life itself has fallen into some kind of stasis.

But it hasn't. Every last one of their favourite regions (by the way, it's no longer "sims") is gone. Almost all their precious, precious landmarks are dead. Replaced by what feels like a whole new world. Everything looks vastly different from what they were used to (and from the 15-year-old in-world pictures which mainstream media use when they do write about Second Life).

And what. The hell. Is. This. MESH?! Is that why you remember avatars' bodies looking differently, although your own avatar still looks like you remember it? Why people may even shun you? Is that why clothes no longer look like painted on? Why they do things you can't possibly imagine prims being able to do? And is that why you wonder how those new in-world structures could possibly have been built out of prims?

Worse yet, #mesh isn't the #NewHotness you think it is. It has become the standard for everything. The system body with its layer clothes and prim and flexi and sculpty attachments is #OldAndBusted.

I hope Maitreya Lara will work for you. For I hate to break that to you, but while it may seem state-of-the-art to someone who left when sculpties were state-of-the-art, from what I can see from outside, from what I've read, it's actually old-fashioned. So much about fashion advice from the mid-2010s. I think the hottest stuff when it comes to female mesh bodies is eBody now, that's the train every last fashion maker jumps onto.

The only place where Maitreya Lara still matters is the #Hypergrid of #OpenSimulator. This is where I reside; I've actually never been to Second Life. There it exists, not quite legally, as Athena, and the reason why it's still popular is because it doesn't have any serious competition.