I've just written about
how Second Life is largely ignored in the Metaverse context, but it's much much worse with worlds based on #
OpenSimulator. Next to nobody even knows that it exists beyond its users, its former users and a few people in #
SecondLife.
Why does it matter then? First of all, because #
OpenSim is the technical foundation for something that comes as close to the literal #
Metaverse as we've gotten thus far: the #
Hypergrid.
Unlike just about all the other #
VirtualWorlds, OpenSim isn't one monolithic entity completely owned and operated by one company or foundation or so. It isn't a virtual world per se. The name rather stands for
thousands of big and small virtual worlds, so-called "grids". The world of Second Life is being referred to as a "grid", too. All these worlds are organised in squares of 256x256m, that's why.
In the case of OpenSim, these grids aren't just places within the same world. They are actually separate worlds. Each one of them is operated by someone else, and each one of them is even hosted individually, some on rented webspace, some on machines the grid owners run at home. Some are owned by companies, some by foundations, most by private persons. And they didn't "rent these worlds from OpenSim", they created them from scratch. There are no higher powers within the OpenSim ecosystem than the grid owners. It's the same as with e-mail or #
XMPP or #
Matrix or #
Mastodon or any other project on the #
Fediverse.
And here is where the #
Hypergrid comes into play: At least 95% of these OpenSim grids are connected with each other, much like e-mail servers or XMPP servers or Mastodon instances or #
Diaspora pods or #
Friendica nodes or #
Hubzilla hubs. Applied to virtual worlds, however, this borders on a sensation: You can have an avatar on one grid, and you can travel to all other grids on the Hypergrid. You usually even take your entire inventory with you, you can even pick up things on other grids and take them home with you, and you can become friends with avatars from other grids.
Essentially, what some big corporations and start-ups try to create from scratch right now has been around and in use since 2008 already. Not experimental use, but everyday production use. For something with so few developers behind it who, due to OpenSim's decentral nature, have to take care of various products, namely OpenSim itself and the viewers, this is remarkable.
In other points, OpenSim is very similar to Second Life. Community-building and creative possibilities are largely the same, only that creativity is stifled by the massive influx of high-quality payware that was stolen from Second Life and is now offered as freebies all over the Hypergrid. I'll come back to that. Okay, and because OpenSim is dirt-cheap in general, and because you can get far without paying a penny, most OpenSim users are unwilling to spend any money on it.
They also laugh about outrageouly expensive land on other worlds. Many of them sell land for hundreds of thousands or even millions of US dollars. Second Life offers land rentals; for example, a 256x256m region on the Mainland costs over $300 a month. Many OpenSim grids offer similar land rentals, but you can get a region of the same size for usually under $20, mostly under $15, often under $10 a month. Or you can host your land yourself and attach it to a grid. Or you can even run your own grid and attach it to the Hypergrid. Not only do most grids have such vast coordinate ranges that they're unlikely to run out of land anytime soon, but you can literally create your own new land.
Of course, all this is a nightmare for those who want to cash in on land sales or land rentals. And the abundance of land leads to the Hypergrid feeling even more like a wasteland than Second Life. By far most people own at least one region, many own more than one, and my estimation is that one out of a dozen OpenSim users is a grid admin.
But why does nobody know OpenSim? Well, I'd say that a key reason is that it's
too decentralised. It doesn't have an umbrella organisation that a) represents OpenSim to the outside world and b) at least tries to steer what's happening in the ecosystem. OpenSim itself, i.e. the server application, is "represented" by, I think, one single remaining permanent developer, and even Ubit Umarov only works on OpenSim in his spare time. He doesn't even have a grid of his own, only a private region on OSgrid.
This means that there is no "official" grid.
OSgrid comes closest. It was the first public grid, it's the oldest grid, it's the biggest grid (it has more land than Second Life), and it's still the grid with the most users. But it is not official. And its only connection to the OpenSim dev team (if there happens to be one) is that it contributes a lot of code. After all, OSgrid is still the same experimental, bleeding-edge grid that it was in 2007 when it was launched to test new features in public.
Like most other big grids, OSgrid presents itself as a stand-alone virtual world. It doesn't even mention that other worlds like it exist.
It does mention the Hypergrid, but instead of explaining what the Hypergrid is, it only gives Hypergrid addresses to its most important official places. It also has
its own forums that seem to try their best to blank out the existence of worlds outside OSgrid. It actually isn't too uncommon for grids to have their own forums. There is, however, not a single general and grid-independent OpenSim forum in English.
Mutual acknowledgement or even collaboration only exists between smaller grids that are less or not at all interested in competition between grids. This includes grids that rely on visitors from the Hypergrid because they've decided not to have a big community of their own, sometimes limiting the number of residents to the grid owners.
OpenSim also doesn't have an official viewer. There are several viewer projects, usually third-party Second Life viewers that also work with OpenSim, but each of them is its own little bubble with hardly any connection to elsewhere. In fact, the most popular viewer, the
Phoenix Firestorm Viewer, can barely keep its OpenSim-specific development running and has to focus on Second Life.
The official OpenSimulator website, and it is actually official, is a wiki with operating a grid as the main focus and grid software development as the secondary focus. Its end user documentation is scarce, even less maintained than the rest of the wiki and thus not as up-to-date as it should be. Especially the
list of public grids, basically the only connection between this website and the rest of the ecosystem, tends to be outdated.
The Second Life Knowledgebase is more useful in anything that isn't OpenSim-specific, and for OpenSim-specific things, you often have to ask for help in-world.
OpenSim's central hub is
OpenSimWorld which is "third-party" again and neither affiliated with the OpenSim devs nor with any one grid. It hosts the closest thing to a central community, but unfortunately with little to no moderation because the one-man staff sees himself as nothing more than the tech admin of a sim catalogue. OpenSimWorld also rendered in-world teleporters to other grids (and even within a grid) largely "obsolete", so these connections between grids and mutual acknowledgements are getting rarer and rarer.
All this contributes to OpenSim being basically completely unknown. Nobody feels responsible enough for OpenSim to advertise the ecosystem as a whole to the outside world. Everyone only cares for their project. The dev team is only that and only responsible for the server application. They would never advertise anything beyond that. Grids only ever advertise themselves, if at all, and even then mostly within the OpenSim ecosystem. If a grid significantly advertises itself beyond that, not only does it do so as a stand-alone world like Second Life or #
HorizonWorlds, but grids that do so are usually grids that aren't really trustworthy. There seems to be more competition than cooperation between grids, not to mention bickering and long-standing petty feuds.
I think it'd be worth representing the OpenSim ecosystem at #
FLOSS or hacker events so that the #
FreeSoftware and #
OpenSource scene becomes aware of it. But the sad fact is that there's nobody who could do that. The ecosystem as a whole doesn't have any representatives, nor does it have anyone who could appoint official representatives, and if you sent someone from a big grid, they'd probably advertise their grid first and foremost and give the impression that their grid is OpenSim.
Lastly, word of mouth doesn't work either because hardly anyone ever talks about OpenSim outside OpenSim.
Within all the ruckus about the #
Metaverse, this is more than a pity. Companies and others try to create something they believe they'll be pioneers at, not knowing it already exists. It's quite similar to whenever someone decides to develop a free, decentral, distributed social network, not knowing that these have been around since #
GNUsocial and Friendica, formerly known as #
Mistpark, because they, too, get next to zero publicity.
It's also a pity because the developers and designers of the coming Metaverse could learn a lot from OpenSim. They could look at how worlds are connected with each other over the Hypergrid. How friendships and groups work on the Hypergrid, if they do, and if they don't, why. They could learn about enforcing rules, guidelines and content ratings in an ecosystem that isn't ruled over by one entity at the top or rather why certain Second Life approaches were bound to fail in OpenSim.
And they could gather some experiences in content protection, especially when, how and why it fails in Second Life and even much more so in OpenSim. Even better if they come to their senses and see that #
NFTs on a #
blockchain aren't a sensible solution because they've got their own ways of abuse which are being exploited right now.
There's the so-called
Metaverse Standards Forum which tries to develop what OpenSim has been running for 14 years now. OpenSim, however, isn't represented in the #
MetaverseStandardsForum at all, not by anyone. Because OpenSim doesn't have anyone to represent the entire ecosystem. Because nobody who deals with OpenSim feels even remotely responsible for the whole thing. Not the core devs, not a single one of the grids, not OpenSimWorld, not the
Infinite Metaverse Alliance, nobody.
Everyone just cares for their niche. You could have half a dozen grids join the MSF, but then you'd end up with six grids representing themselves as individual grids rather than as parts of something bigger and overarching, and you still wouldn't have the OpenSim core dev team on-board. The core dev team, in turn, can barely keep up with developing OpenSim, so how should they have time to represent OpenSim in the MSF?
And so, the MSF will continue creating something which they wrongly believe has never been done before because there's nobody there to tell them about OpenSim. They'll have to design from scratch, from zero what they don't know already exists with open source codes to look at and with 14 years of experience to learn from.
By the way: #
LindenLab isn't a member of the MSF either.
If someone actually started an umbrella organisation for OpenSim, and be it only to represent it, that might help, but it's also likely that it wouldn't because it would only join a tiny fraction of all possible participants under its roof. Important potential members wouldn't have enough time and/or energy, and I'm sure this will include the core dev team. Others simply won't be interested in contributing to anything beyond their niche. Others again will boycott it if they see the "wrong" grids or people having joined it. They don't want to collaborate with "this" grid or "that" person, and be it due to some six-year-old personal beef. Yet others will refuse to join because they dislike (one of) the founder(s), or because (one of) the founder(s) is a resident on the wrong grid. Of what few members the organisation may have, some will try their best to misuse their membership only for their own profit while others will quit again due to too much drama.
And it'd be everyone for themselves again like it is now.
