#hypergrid — Public Fediverse posts

Here's a premiere: the first #FollowFriday for #OpenSimulator.

For those who don't know what I'm talking about: OpenSimulator, also called #OpenSim, is a free and #OpenSource platform for 3-D #VirtualWorlds that uses largely the same technology as #SecondLife. It was launched as early as 2007. It mostly became a network of #federated, interconnected worlds (#grids) when the #Hypergrid was introduced in 2008. And "#Metaverse" has been a part of the standard OpenSim vocabulary since before 2010, too.

It currently measures about 420 public grids at various sizes from tiny to slightly larger than Second Life itself and countless private grids, the vast majority of which are on the Hypergrid.

So without further ado, here are some suggestions:

• Shelenn Ayres
  #InfiniteMetaverseAlliance CEO. Co-organiser of the on-going #OpenSimFest #OSFest2023 that'll continue until the end of the month. Follow her now for the daily schedule. Also maybe your first #Friendica connection.
  → @Shelenn Ayres
  
• Mal Burns
  Creator and main host of #InworldReview, also creator of several other YouTube video series about virtual worlds. One of the organisers of #HypergridInternationalExpo which will return next month after six years.
  → Main account: @Mal Burns Main
  → OpenSim account: @Metaworld Opensim Social
  
• Thirza Ember
  Organiser of the weekly #HGSafari. One of the hosts of Inworld Review. Another one of the organisers of #HIE.
  → @Thirza
  
• Tosha Tyran
  One of the four founders and owners of #CraftWorld, one of the five oldest grids. Another one of the organisers of HIE.
  → @Tosha T.
  
• Kelso Uxlay
  Co-founder and co-owner of the #CreaNovale grid. Co-builder of the famous four-seasons varsim known as #Novale. And yet another one of the organisers of HIE.
  → @Kelso Uxlay
  
• Lone Wolf
  Founder and owner of the #WolfTerritoriesGrid, the second-largest OpenSim grid. Might be the single person who owns the most virtual land in the world, but he offers it for rent. Also founder and owner of the OpenSimSocial #Mastodon instance.
  → @Lone Wolf
  
• Hyacinth Jean
  Founder and owner of the #GroovyVerse grid and the GroovyToot Mastodon instance. Prolific #MeshBody maker; has forked Ruth 2.0 into #LuvMyBod and Diana and created her own private mesh body. Currently working on an alternative to #OpenSimWorld.
  → @Hyacinth 🏳️‍⚧️ ☮️
  
• vrsimility
  Working on an authentic, detailed recreation of 19th century #Liverpool in OpenSim.
  → @vrsimility
  
• OpenSimulator Community Conference
  The #OSCC is a yearly community event with a whole number of panels about OpenSim in particular and virtual worlds in general. Expect #OSCC23 to happen in December.
  → @OpenSim Community Conference
  
• Finally, the OpenSim community on #Lemmy
  Not a user for a change, but a place on Lemmy for OpenSim users/avatars to meet and discuss.
  → @OpenSim

#FOSS #FLOSS #Decentralized #Decentralization #Decentralised #Decentralisation #VirtualWorld #WolfTerritories #WolfGrid #Ruth2 #OSFest

Here's a newsflash for everyone interested in #OpenSimulator:

AviTron will shut down on August 28th.

I guess #AviTron shutting down isn't the actual surprise. It's rather AviTron having survived for more than two years plus the fact that grid founder and owner Alexsandro Pomposelli, also known as Alex Ferraris, has announced a grid shutdown for the first time. Now, if he also gave out IARs and OARs to his residents, that'd be a miracle.

I mean, he really rose to infamy when he managed to run his first grid, #AviWorlds, into the ground a whopping 13 times within 10 years. You can read about much of the drama on #HypergridBusiness.

All closures were permanent and unannounced, whatever the reason for the shutdowns might have been. Now, these reasons included various kinds of drama as well as AviWorlds running out of money or Alex running AviWorlds on servers in his garage, dismissing all criticism that the power supply was absolutely inappropriate for that. Guess how the latter ended.

Never did the residents get any backups. No IARs, no OARs, and if they had invested money in the grid, they lost that, too. It wasn't like Alex couldn't or didn't want to create IARs or OARs. At least the last few times when AviWorlds came back, all the official sims owned by Alex himself looked just like before the previous closure.

In one case, not only AviWorlds went down the gutter, but so did the grid hosting company Alex had started. That hosting company took about half a dozen active grids with itself, leaving their owners without at least recent backups.

Alex eventually sold AviWorlds, backups included, to Josh Boam in 2020 and wanted the name and the domain back shortly after. He got neither. This incarnation of AviWorlds is still up and running.

Afterwards, Alex launched #VirtualVille which, again, didn't even get to live for a year before it shut down out of the blue, leaving Alex' faithful followers as well as clueless newbies with no backups.

In early 2021, he came back with AviTron which, so he promised, would be different. Well, it was different in a few ways. The grid had its own hosting company again, now running in South America and staffed with cheap labour. Alex could claim that he had created jobs down there.

And he was shooting for the top. He saw the #Hypergrid as either a competition between grids or an out-right war. Either way, he announced that AviTron would win over all other grids. It was never clear if he wanted AviTron to achieve that by having both more land area and more residents than even #OSgrid, the biggest OpenSim grid which had had 14 years to grow to its size, or be it by actually vanquishing all other grids and becoming the only surviving OpenSim grid.

The latter doesn't sound too far-fetched, considering his aggressive tone. On #OpenSimWorld, he was constantly lashing out against critics and even announced to doxx them in real life. At the same time, nobody was allowed to reply to his posts and comments.

Later the same year, he struck an exclusive deal with #Sacrarium. The Kazakh-Russian grid which had been built around the distribution of illegally obtained #SecondLife content, which was now specialising in just that, had introduced a monthly subscription fee for granting Hypergrid access to individual avatars after a series of grid blockings. AviTron's deal was for the whole grid to pay the fee so that all its residents could have free access to Sacrarium. However, Sacrarium demanded AviTron put all content on the grid on no-export, thereby at least theoretically making it impossible to take any content from AviTron to other grids. It was completely unclear where Alex wanted to get that money from.

It was then that AviTron really exploded with new users. Alex claimed that they had all found new homes. In reality, however, there were two kinds of new users. One was the freebie junkie who only went to AviTron to always get the latest new arrivals on Sacrarium first. Since these were rare, many of them began to satisfy their hunger for freebies by going around the Hypergrid and copybotting entire sims wholesale, especially when there were purpose-built, one-of-a-kind buildings on them. This led to AviTron being blocked by more and more grids.

The other kind were freebie sim owners outside AviTron. They created avatars on AviTron, went to Sacrarium, often picked up everything from every freebie store and then circumvented AviTron's no-export setting and removed the no-transfer restriction on the Sacrarium boxes. What used to be exclusive Sacrarium content was now spreading across the Hypergrid full-perm, causing some more "How dare you steal my stolen content" #drama.

When geopolitical events rendered the Sacrarium deal null and void, AviTron lost what little appeal it had to anyone but total newbies.

By the way, there were actually AviTron users who sold copybotted Second Life content for money, either in-world for Gloebits which can be exchanged for real money or even in webshops for real money. This was illegal as per AviTron's TOS, but Alex' reaction was that if it's illegal, it isn't happening.

Speaking of content and TOS, for quite a while, the AviTron TOS said that everything on AviTron's asset server is Alex' exclusive intellectual property. This applied to what little stuff was created on AviTron, legal freebies from the rest of the Hypergrid, even when they actually had licenses on them, legal payware from the rest of the Hypergrid and even Second Life content that was circulating on the Hypergrid. Alex was publicly called out for this, and he actually had to change the TOS under that pressure. It would have been interesting to see reactions in Second Life upon lots of creations by Maitreya, SLink, BlueBerry and others suddenly allegedly being the intellectual property of an OpenSim grid owner.

AviTron is also responsible for the "Inaccurate" value for the visitor count on OpenSimWorld. It was introduced after AviTron staff had parked some 20 permanently AFK avatars on a sim owned by a resident who didn't know any of Alex' history and put full faith into him. Generally, this is a very popular method of manipulating visitor stats and pushing sims up OpenSimWorld's oh-so-prestigious list of most popular sims, but nobody had had the audacity to place more than four AFK avatars yet, much less 20. And Alex insisted in them all actually being regular traffic.

Eventually, the pressure became so immense that AviTron was forced to retreat from the OpenSim community by and by. First, after Sacrarium, AviTron became the second of still only two grids to be completely banned from OpenSimWorld. A lot has to happen for this measure. In February of 2023, AviTron stopped reporting stats to Hypergrid Business; before that, AviTron ranked second in active users and first in new registrations, but only 17th in land area, being a bit more than 1/40 as big as OSgrid. With five regular monthly users for each standard region (in OSgrid, it's the other way around), it was clear that people weren't looking for new homes.

When Alex started charging AviTron residents for things that are normally free-of-charge, some expected that AviTron's end by going broke was coming closer. It wasn't to be.

The last "sign of life" was when AviTron officially closed its Hypergrid access for whichever reasons. It wasn't too much of a loss for the Hypergrid, I guess, seeing as how many grids had blocked AviTron already, some only having that one grid on their block lists. Alex was infamous for closing Hypergrid access on his grids and then bringing it back, but this time, it was final.

Now AviTron was isolated by choice, but it was blocked by large parts of the Hypergrid anyway. With the Hypergrid connection gone, no new content came into the grid. Alex says he has invited creators to come over to AviTron. I guess actual established creators of legal content were asked to fully relocate from where they had been before to AviTron where their creations would have been no-export. It's clear that and why they refused to do that. And those who referred to putting copybotted SL content back together and replacing its missing scripts if necessary as "creating" had the same reason not to follow his call.

Also, advertisement had become difficult. Hypergrid Business had stopped writing about AviTron except for the stats in late 2021. OpenSimWorld had banned the grid and its residents, but even without the ban, AviTron sims wouldn't have been allowed on OSW due to being disconnected from the Hypergrid.

Without Hypergrid access, AviTron must have lost lots of users. Three freebie hoarders must have gone elsewhere, as have the Sacrarium exporters who may now resort to stealing directly from Second Life. Even newbies who had discovered AviTron's glossy website with its spectacular pictures blistering with stolen content by Googling the term #Metaverse must have left for greener pastures after finding out about the Hypergrid through other avatars.

With nothing left to keep the grid running for, no revenue stream, the grid's reputation in shambles and, most importantly, nothing to brag about anymore and nowhere to brag about it, it's only logical to shut AviTron down. I wonder if it'll pass out IARs and OARs this time, and I wonder how many grid residents will actually be left to ask for them. After all, he doesn't have a track record of doing so.

Lastly, I wouldn't be too surprised if Alex came back with a new grid under a new name. And sadly, I wouldn't be too surprised if he still had faithful followers who'd immediately be on board again.

#VirtualWorlds

Since a couple months ago, you can read it all over the place: "The #Metaverse is dead." Everyone agreed, because for 99% of all people out there, "Metaverse" refers to the series of 3-D #VirtualWorlds (to be) launched by #Meta, formerly #Facebook. And as far as I know, Zuckerberg actually tried to use "Metaverse" as the registered, trademarked, exclusive brand name for his worlds until he learned that he can't trademark something already used in a commercially published novel, namely Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson from 1991.

Thus, he settled for names like #HorizonWorlds which nobody knows nor cares about because everyone still speaks of Meta's worlds as "the Metaverse". And I guess people would continue to do so even if Snow Crash was turned into a massive Hollywood blockbuster with a budget of $400M that makes $4B in theatres within the first week.

What we can take away from this is that Mark Zuckerberg did, in fact, not invent the term "metaverse".

Oh, and just recently, Linden Labs started a massive PR campaign for #SL20B, the 20th birthday of #SecondLife which has also only recently started referring to itself as a "metaverse" to try and jump into the gap that the Horizons leave behind as Meta drops them like they're hot in favour of #ArtificialIntelligence.

Many have rubbed their eyes in disbelief. Didn't Second Life, like, shut down in, what, 2008 or 2009? Because the rampant news coverage about it died down back then. Yeah, but that was because it was no longer viable for commercial mainstream mass media to have virtual offices in Second Life after what few big corporations had joined it had left again. And when journalists stopped using their avatars (said avatars are still there, only unused), they didn't know what was happening in Second Life anymore. Besides, what was still happening in Second Life was only of interest for Second Life residents, but not for casual mass media consumers.

Nonetheless, Second Life continued to exist, and it does so until today. It even developed and advanced greatly. Today's avatars look nothing like those from 2007 when the hype was the biggest and from when the most images and videos seem to have survived. Oh, and they blow everything that Horizons has ever dared to demonstrate clean out of the water while consisting entirely of user-generated content.

What we can take away from this is that the Metaverse (no capital M here) is not dead, and that #HorizonWorldsIsNotTheMetaverse and has never been "The Metaverse".

However, between Snow Crash and the renaming of Facebook (the corporation) into Meta, the term "metaverse" was still used a lot, only it was used in places which next to nobody even knew, which are still largely unknown today. I'm talking about the worlds based on #OpenSimulator, a sort of free and open-source implementation of Second Life, and its community.

To give you a few examples: Alternate Metaverse counts as the fifth-biggest #OpenSim grid by active users and the sixth-largest by land area. It was launched in late 2019 under this name. That already was well before Zuck implied having invented 3-D virtual worlds. And the name wasn't chosen to cash in on Snow Crash, but because the word "metaverse" had been all around OpenSim for years already.

The Infinite Metaverse Alliance is from 2016, if not even older. And it has always been all about OpenSim with two grids of its own, one named Metaverse Depot.

#Metropolis, launched in 2008 was one of the first OpenSim grids, it was the first mostly German-speaking OpenSim grid, and when it was shut down for good almost a year ago, it was the third-oldest still existing grid. Its full name was "Metropolis Metaversum" for which there's proof from as early as 2010.

I'm tempted to say the earliest uses of the term "metaverse" in conjunction with OpenSim go back until even earlier in 2008 when OpenSim introduced the #Hypergrid which federated grids much like Fediverse instances are federated: For the first and so far only time in the history of virtual worlds, it became possible for avatars to travel between separate worlds with separate operators. Some said the Hypergrid was worth being referred to as a metaverse.

This was when it was increasingly attempted to define what a metaverse or the Metaverse is. Another idea was that "the Metaverse" refers to the entirety of all virtual worlds, regardless of whether they're connected or not. It would include 3-D worlds like Second Life, There or the various OpenSim grids, it would include 2½-D isometric worlds like Furcadia, it would include 2-D worlds and maybe even text-only worlds, and it would include out-right games like Minecraft or World of Warcraft, even if the worlds in the former are created procedurally. Basically, "metaverse" became the new "cyberspace".

And then there were those who had probably read Snow Crash and who knew what the Metaverse in that book is: a centralised, monolithic, corporate-owned walled garden. Essentially, that Metaverse was a vision of an Internet that had evolved into a 3-D world, but in 1991, the Internet largely consisted of corporate-owned walled gardens such as AOL and CompuServe itself, and Microsoft tried to establish its own one. That was three years before the World-Wide Web.

So while the requirement of being corporate-run and even a walled garden wasn't pursued further, "metaverse" was defined as being one single world. According to this definition, there isn't "the Metaverse", but there are many metaverses. Each OpenSim grid would be its own metaverse. No wonder not few grids actually refer to themselves as metaverses.

Sometimes, another criterium is added to the definition: It's only truly a metaverse when it's possible to move between separate locations (rooms, spaces, lands, call them whatever) by natural means. Usually, a virtual world has to be divided into smaller units, especially if these smaller units can be run by someone else than the creators/owners of the whole world. Now, this criterium means that these units have to at least be able to directly border on one another. An avatar standing near the border between two units must be able to look into the neighbouring unit. And in order to enter the neighbouring unit, the avatar must be able to walk or ride a vehicle that's actually moving instead of being a teleporter in disguise (I've seen both in OpenSim). Teleportation must not be a requirement out of basic technological limitations.

Now, imagine a virtual world that's IRC or Discord ported to 3-D just like the Metaverse in Snow Crash is AOL ported to 3-D, a world that only consists of separate, enclosed chatrooms which are built in-world as virtual conference rooms which you enter by logging into them and leave by logging out again. It probably doesn't have any windows. It definitely doesn't have a door working as such; either there is no door, or the door is decoration, or the door is the logout button, but there's nothing outside that door. If your avatar runs into that door, provided your avatar can walk and isn't bound to a chair at the conference table (yes, there are virtual worlds in which avatars can't walk around), it'll log out of that conference room and back into a kind of lobby. By the above criterium, this cannot be a metaverse.

However, if the door actually opens, and your avatar can look and walk through it into a hallway, from there into the lobby and even leave the building, then we're getting closer to a metaverse, probably even more so if the conference room is actually a separate virtual location operated by someone else than the lobby and the hallways.

Second Life fulfills this definition. You can walk around the mainland for hours, constantly crossing from one sim into another, all rented and designed by different residents, even though they all run on the same server cluster under Linden Labs' control. Sure, you can teleport, but that's only necessary if there's no other way to get somewhere. That might be because your current location and/or your destination is too remote, i.e. isolated by empty regions with no sims running in them which can't be crossed, or out of convenience because your destination is too far away.

OpenSim grids fulfill it, too, while the Hypergrid doesn't. The Hypergrid requires teleportation because it connects separate worlds and not different places within the same world. Otherwise, it's like Second Life while sometimes taking the "separate places with separate owners" part even further: Between renting land on grids and running a whole grid of your own, you can host your own sims and have them attached to certain existing grids. As a visitor, it might actually happen that you walk not only from one sim to another, but onto someone else's machine.

Still, if you look around, if you look at the various platforms that have "metaverse" painted on them, whether they're operational or only vague concepts, each one of their creators has a different definition of what a metaverse or the Metaverse is, always corresponding on what they plan their worlds to be like. Corporations that place all their bets on #VirtualReality claim that "pancake" worlds which can be accessed through conventional devices with 2-D screens like Second Life or the OpenSim grids can't be metaverses. Those who want to include the real life and #AugmentedReality or #MixedReality claim that this is part of the very definition of "metaverse" so that they can also deny VR-only platforms such as #VRchat or #RecRoom any metaverse status. At the same time, even companies that offer nothing more than e.g. concerts in virtual reality claim that their secluded concert venues make up a metaverse, too.

Corporate definitions of "metaverse" almost always amount to, "A metaverse is what we call a metaverse; all metaverse definitions by our competitors are false, they don't have/work on true metaverses." Exceptions are limited to Meta ("We're inventing the Metaverse from scratch. Wait, what do you mean, we can't trademark that word?") and Linden Labs ("We've had a metaverse before any of you even had computers. And our very own Philip Rosedale has actually read Snow Crash. Your arguments are invalid.").

Sometimes the definition of "metaverse" even goes hand-in-hand with a declaration of what makes a virtual world, and what's necessary to build and operate one. Cryptobros, for example, insist that the Metaverse/metaverses/virtual worlds can impossibly function without a blockchain, a cryptocurrency and NFTs. Others who invest in AI currently state that virtual worlds won't and can't be possible without AI. Second Life has been proving them all wrong by successfully and continually running a virtual world without a blockchain, without crypto, without NFTs and without AI for two decades now, but they build their business model on their customers either never having even heard of Second Life or believing it was shut down before summer 2009.

The IEEE even has a scientific paper on the definition of "metaverse". No, really.

This leads us to a set of criteria for the Metaverse or a metaverse that may or may not be valid.

The first one is that it's 3-D. This is easy to agree upon unless pre-3-D worlds protest against that definition.

Persistence is another criterium. The world must not only exist on your end-user device and start up when you join it and shut down again when you leave. This is generally fulfilled. Generally because many OpenSim users run their own grids based on the #DreamGrid distribution on Windows computers at home. Some do leave them running 24/7, others only start them up when they're at home and awake. And then there are those who only own one functional computer which therefore serves as both the machine they run their viewer on and their grid server. Now, the typical Windows user starts up their machine when they need it and shuts it down when they're done. So there are actually public grids that are only online when their grid owners are, even if that's only two or three hours a day. But this only applies to a limited number of grids and not OpenSim as a whole. That said, even grid servers in data centres running larger public grids have to be restarted every once in a while.

Thirdly, some make a functioning economy an absolute requirement for a virtual world to call itself a metaverse. Second Life has one that works so well that Linden Labs makes more money per user and month than Meta, all without privacy breaches. It helps that nearly all in-world content is made by users, and Linden Labs doesn't take offering free content in larger quantities kindly.

Its younger open-source sibling, OpenSim, however, which has been referred to as a metaverse or multiple metaverses would fail this definition. It's technically impossible to implement an in-world economy both with "monopoly money" and with virtual currencies that can be exchanged with real money, either grid-independently (Gloebit, Podex) or grid-specific (like #Kitely or #WolfTerritoriesGrid handle it). But the vast majority of grids has chosen not to include any method of payment for anything. OpenSim in general doesn't even need an economy because most grids by far are run by hobbyists in their spare time. And openly for-profit grids are not only suspicious, but usually not very long-lived. In the meantime, OSgrid, the first, oldest and largest of all grids, celebrates its 16th birthday next month (I guess), and it's non-commercial and running on donations.

By the way, OpenSim also took over Second Life's set of item permissions. But since so many avatars in OpenSim have access to admin mode ("god mode") which can override them, they're symbolic at best and useless at worst.

Immersion is a point that's being debated. However, this lastly depends not only on the underlying technology, but also on how in-world places are designed. Immersion is something that I personally am very very interested in. But most OpenSim users neither know what it is, nor do they care, especially not if it stands in the way of convenience. For example, building an in-door club with no doors to the outside saves the sim owner the effort of a) cutting a hole into the walls of the building and b) scripting and configuring a door. Sim owners tend to believe that if they wouldn't use such a door, nobody would. But a building with no doors is not very credible and realistic, and having to teleport to get into it and back out is not very immersive.

If we're talking about "the Metaverse" instead of single virtual worlds as metaverses, decentralisation is of course important. Now, by this definition, everything else from Second Life to #Roblox to #Fortnite to Horizon Worlds is just a bunch of centralised walled gardens and not even close to being part of the Metaverse. The few exceptions are all not corporate-owned; they include the #HighFidelity fork #Vircadia, the Vircadia fork #Overte and OpenSim's Hypergrid. The latter is made up from hundreds, if not thousands of separate grids, and very very rarely do even two have the same owner. On top of that, there isn't even an "official grid" run by the developers; lead dev Ubit Umarov only owns one standard region that's externally attached to OSgrid.

On the other hand, OpenSim entirely runs on one and the same software product. Even if various versions and even a number of forks are in use, it's only one platform and not several. And besides, how can the Hypergrid be "the Metaverse" if only a tiny minority of the grids that make it up pass the "metaverse litmus test" themselves because they don't have an economy?

Not even Vircadia could comply with this definition. It's decentralised, and it's commercial. Also, it's said to be fully compatible with Overte, so we already have two different virtual world platforms interacting. But for one, Overte is still a Vircadia fork, a soft fork even, so they aren't as different as Second Life and #ThirdRoom, and Overte messes with the economy requirement by being decidedly non-commercial at platform level already.

But seriously, debating such details is kind of futile as long as it's even unclear if it's "a metaverse/multiple metaverses" or "the Metaverse". So no, nobody has the privilege of having that one single "official" definition of "metaverse".

Some people really don't seem to be qualified to have their sims listed on #OpenSimWorld. Why? Because they're incapable of properly setting up the beacon, and they're too indifferent to maintain it.

For starters, I guess they get themselves an OSW beacon and expect it to run perfectly right after rezzing it on their sims. But then they discover two things. One, it doesn't. Two, there's a notecard with a manual. And they're like, "lol cant be bothered to read shit" and dismiss it. But they want their sim on OSW. For that, they need the beacon to work.

So they open the notecard, and they try to skip right to what to do to get the beacon working. Then they try to do that with an absolute minimum of reading.

Some also try to set up the OSW page for their sim without reading up on anything and thus never have it shown as online. But let's put this aside.

Once they actually get the beacon and the connection to OSW working, they say, "My work here is done," and walk away again. It works, so what else should they have to do?

What else? Well, that's in the notecard, too. Make the beacon non-copyable. This is not optional. Even if this isn't required for the beacon to work, it's still mandatory.

Otherwise, people may come and copy the beacon and plop it down on their own sims. As it is. With someone else's beacon key in it. Because they don't know how it works. Because they don't really know what it is in the first place. Because they take it for nothing else than a cool and nifty #Hypergrid teleporter. Because they've never heard of the the website OpenSimWorld. Even though the beacon rubs it into their faces.

I'm not even kidding. I myself took more than a month of using OSW beacons as teleporters, also because nobody was there to explain to me how to Hypergrid using the map (#Metropolis had exactly zero newbie guidance), before I discovered the website. And someone I got to know later had been in #OpenSim for seven years, had seen dozens upon dozens upon dozens of beacons and still didn't know what OpenSimWorld was and what the beacons were.

Okay, so what's so bad about copying the beacon for your own sim? It's so bad because if you copy the beacon from sim Foo and put it on your own sim named Bar, both beacons will submit data to the same OSW entry. OSW will take both sims for Foo. It will mistake your sim Bar for Foo. The beacon you've rezzed on Bar is still set up for Foo.

The consequences: At least for some time, again and again, OSW will list "Bar" as the name of Foo in Foo's own entry. And it will also replace the "Foo" in the Hypergrid address with "Bar" then, making Foo inaccessible via Hypergrid address. People who blindly copy-paste Hypergrid addresses into their maps will come complaining to the owner of Foo that their viewers can't find Foo.

And why is that so? It's because OSW relies on so-called beacon keys. As a sim owner, you generate the beacon key for your sim in the entry for your sim on OSW, and then you go in-world and enter the key into your beacon. This establishes the connection between the beacon and the OSW entry.

This is necessary because the beacon can read sim names, but not grid names, so it can't uniquely identify sims by their addresses. This is because the OSW beacon is scripted entirely in #LSL so it even works on sims that don't allow any #OSSL for whatever reasons. And LSL was developed by Linden Labs for #SecondLife, so why should it support reading grid names if it was made for a virtual world with only one grid?

So, back to the issue: The beacon key establishes the connection between the beacon and the OSW entry. Problem: The beacon key establishes the connection between any beacon with this key in it and that OSW entry. Regardless of where the beacon is. It can be on an entirely different sim and still connect to that same OSW entry and submit data to it. There can be copies of this beacon with this key in it on dozens of sims, and they'll all report to the one same OSW entry, completely confusing both OSW and its users.

Satyr Aeon says the current version of the beacon has a built-in safeguard against this. Once you rez it somewhere, it resets and deletes whatever beacon key may be inside it. But there are still plenty of misconfigured (or not sufficiently configured) older beacons out there. And every few days or weeks, one of them is copied by someone.

I've lost count on how many times I've told sim owners that just this has happened to them, that they have to get themselves a new beacon key, and that they have to make their beacons uncopyable. And I've also lost count on how many times sim owners got new beacon keys (or outright deleted and re-entered their sims on OSW because they didn't know how to make a new beacon key) but left their beacons free for everyone to take.

Why do I still do that? Because most sim owners who have this happen to their sims won't notice. They only ever visit their own OSW entries if they want to post something. And because I guess nobody else would notify them, much less also tell them what to do to fix the situation and keep it from re-occurring.

#OpenSimulator #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #PetPeeve

And #drama in #OpenSim has reached new levels. Now it's two copybotters against each other. Both have actually stolen already stolen content.

The difference is: One has stolen content that someone else has stolen from Second Life and got caught trying to sell it for real money. He actually threatens the other one with Interpol for content theft. He also seems to have boatloads of alts under different names, and he has already created at least one sock puppet account on #OpenSimWorld.

Said other one was caught by #OSgrid officials walking onto official sims like #LbsaPlaza with a copybot viewer and at least the clear intent to copybot the entire sim wholesale, custom structures and all, if not even actually doing just that. Mind you, Lbsa Plaza is the only sim that's always populated with avatars which aren't alts of the sim owner, so there's also always a number of avatar inventories to copybot. He denied all accusations and blocked OSgrid from his grid in retaliation.

Seriously, these are the moments when I wish Linden Labs, along with the actual content creators, would send in the authorities. If they put enough effort into the investigations, I could see at least one certain grid being shut down and a number of people being convicted and arrested. But this won't happen, especially not in this case, for various reasons.

One, the financial damage is too small, at least in this case. It simply isn't worth pumping so much money into lawsuits and criminal investigations.

Two, in this case again, it'd have to be global investigations across several continents. The former guy has Spanish as his native language and obviously uses Google Translate to post in English, the latter runs a grid with a .ru domain. So we probably aren't talking about U.S. citizens and most likely not even about people living anywhere in the Western world.

Three, if Linden Labs actually decided to take world-wide legal action against stuff like this, they wouldn't concentrate on these two. I think they'd more likely go all-out and try to combat the theft and distribution of SL content all over the #Hypergrid, thereby threatening the existence of entire grids, but at least almost all freebie sims launched over the last five years or so. Pandora's box would be wide open.

#OpenSimulator #Drama