A look at a virtual worlds system which is so decentralised that nothing is "official"

It's hilarious how Decentraland declares itself "the first decentralized Metaverse". It isn't really decentralised. The only thing decentralised about it is that it is not using the Bitcoin blockchain. And even if it was decentralised, it wouldn't be the first. Far from it.

Decentraland was opened to the public in February, 2020. OpenSimulator came out in January, 2007. A bit over 13 years earlier. And unlike Decentraland which is actually a centralised, monolithic, walled-garden world, OpenSim is actually decentralised. Right now, there are over 4,000 individual, fully independent worlds, so-called "grids". And in summer 2008, OpenSim introduced the Hypergrid which made it possible for avatars to teleport from one grid to another, taking their looks, their inventories etc. with them. More than 95% of all grids are connected to the Hypergrid today.

One could say it's like the Fediverse. But there are a few differences.

For one, OpenSim does not connect to anything else, only to itself and its own various forks. Even that story of Lindens allegedly teleporting from Second Life to OpenSim back in 2008 was nothing but a dolled-up and completely faked publicity stunt with the extra implication that this could never be made to work properly, probably to dampen Second Life users' hopes that they could go freebie-shopping and grab cheap land on the Hypergrid with their existing avatars.

Besides, OpenSim takes decentralisation even further than most of the Fediverse.

This starts with the lack of an official "lighthouse grid". There is no official grid.

Yes, you may say there is OSgrid. It was the first public grid, it is the oldest grid and one out of only two surviving grids from the 2000s, and it is used as a testbed for OpenSim development.

But it is not official in the sense of "OpenSim itself" being behind it.

OpenSim itself, that's about five hobbyist, spare-time developers, only one of whom, Ubit Umarov, actually acts as a coder because he doesn't let anyone else's code in. There is no CEO. There is no management. There actually is nothing else. Only these few plus a homepage/wiki, a code repository and a Mantis bug tracker. That's all there is about OpenSim itself.

To my best knowledge, none of the five devs is an OSgrid admin at the same time. The OpenSim devs don't run their own grid either. There isn't even a single official OpenSim sim.

Ubit himself has only got one standard-region-sized sim in OSgrid which he hosts himself somewhere, and which he calls home. I've actually been there with the HG Safari a couple years ago. It isn't even listed on OpenSimWorld.

Speaking of which, OpenSimWorld is a kind of central hub for the Hypergrid. It's a sim catalogue, an event calendar, a discussion platform for the community, a script repository and so forth. But what it is not is affiliated with OpenSim itself. None of the devs are behind it. It's actually operated by Satyr Aeon, creator of the Satyr Farm, the sailing script system SFsail and the animation controller SFposer.

It gets even better: The vast majority of grids doesn't even run vanilla OpenSim. The huge majority of grids, especially but not only small personal grids, are based on Outworldz DreamGrid, a Windows-only OpenSim fork and distribution that's entirely controlled via a native Windows point-and-click user interface. It's particularly attractive for those who want to have their main avatar under their own jurisdiction instead of someone else's.

Also, to my best knowledge, OSgrid is the only one of the big grids that runs vanilla code. The devs rely on it for finding bugs and the like. The other big grids run forks. Some of them like Kitely and ZetaWorlds have their own forks which are often proprietary and closed-source because Ubit doesn't accept code donations anyway. @Lone Wolf's Wolf Territories, the biggest grid at least by land mass, run on OpenSim-Tranquility, a fork originally made for Utopia Skye Grid by its admin.

There are no official OpenSim events either. The yearly OpenSimulator Community Conference uses two subdomains of OpenSim's, one for the website, one for its own grid, but it's still independent. Hypergrid International Expo? Even more independent and at home in Craft-World. OpenSimFest (no operational website currently)? In spite of the name, an independent third-party event yet again. If there's anything official, it's official for a certain grid, for example grid birthdays like OSgrid's upcoming OSG18B, or for a certain organisation that's present in OpenSim.

All this also means that, like in the Fediverse, there is no overarching anything in OpenSim, no organisation that could advertise OpenSim, not even any rule-making. One side-effect is that sim owners can not only make their own rules, but they can bend rules that one may expect to be fixed to their liking. While some OpenSim users assume, and often correctly, that OpenSim's definitions of the three sim ratings which it shares with Second Life are the same as in Second Life, there are sim owners who have one-sidedly re-defined the Adult rating as "same as General, PG-rated, but no child avatars allowed" to keep actual, potential or alleged paedos out. As if this couldn't be done any other way.

Altogether, after 18 years of OpenSim and 17 years of the Hypergrid, it's still very much a frontier, and it will remain a frontier. Even more so than the Fediverse.