What happens if Linden lab closes/shuts down

[Arielle Popstar]

1 minute ago, halebore Aeon said:

Yes and when SL is fully integrated or migrated on the cloud things will be back to normal. They explained this during last years SL17B or at a lab gab.

 

I believe I heard it from Oz at a recent meeting too.

[Love Zhaoying]

3 minutes ago, halebore Aeon said:

things will be back to normal

Normal is ok? Got it!

[Coffee Pancake]

I'm more inclined to believe that as part of the transfer of power a spending freeze is in place, no new money for new things (including hardware for regions).

That's obviously not something to tell us lot though ..

[bigmoe Whitfield]

5 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

SL is almost the smallest it has been since the initial launch spike, the decision to stop selling regions has everything to do with LL being taken over and nothing to do with the platforms scalability,

Physical hardware space in the datacenter is the reason.   uplift should solve that issue.

[Ardy Lay]

We already had a detailed discussion about this.  The plan was to cease hardware purchases and move simulators to somebody else's hardware, aka "the cloud".  The cessation of region sales occurred sooner than planned for the uplift because the region sales rate increased dramatically and depleted the available hardware faster than anticipated.  Hardware cannot be added to the current colocation space at it too is at capacity.  Region sales will resume once the uplift is completed.

[examining]

SL will not close down and let me alone in the world.

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

I love to bump old threads just for the fun of it, so here I am again 

Sooo this thread started in 2019. Fun days. We had no idea what was happening under the hood. Sansar seemed to be a failure, but, alas, it was still around, and thus it was a potential 'escape' for people fans of virtual worlds and Linden Lab. If not, there were other alternatives, such as, say, Philip Rosedale's own High Fidelity. And Facebook's Horizon was... well, on the horizon. Oh, and of course, there was always OpenSim as a 'last chance'.

It's two years later (or so), six months after the last post before mine. A lot has happened:

• Sansar was shut down (and all staff — including the precious developers! — came back to work on SL instead. It shows!)
• High Fidelity gave up on its own virtual world, and are now doing some kind of voice chat thingy (Philip Rosedale got his [small] fortune selling one of the first Internet-based videoconferencing system to RealNetworks)
• Linden Lab was sort-of-acquired (well, they technically did get acquired, it's just that it wasn't a nefarious takeover where the new owners would squeeze the company dry and shut it down...) and has established themselves for the long haul, no matter what the future might bring — with their current profits and the always-welcome tapping of unlimited extra money from their new owners, they're safe for another decade or four, even if they continue to lose a slight number of users every month...
• The 'push to the cloud' is almost finished, or possibly has already happened, and that basically means that LL will never face a 'lack of land' ever again. It also means a much better management of resources: at long last, idle regions (and we know that the vast majority of them will be idle almost all the time — just storing content until eventually someone passes nearby to see it) will not waste CPU and memory, but will be 'activated on demand' if and when the need arises. Storage on the cloud is cheap (and fail-proof — no more loss of data!), computing resources are not, but since LL will consume CPU/memory only what they need it, it means that their overall operation will cost much, much less than before, and scale much more easily than before (just click on a backoffice button, launch a new instance of a region simulator, and off you go). It's not likely that LL will reduce the prices, though; the massive cost reduction is basically a safeguard for the future, as eventually more private regions are abandoned; in the meantime, the extra profits accruing from the cost reduction will make investors happy and give LL an opportunity to stash some money in the bank for the 'bad days' ahead (assuming that there will be bad days, of course...).
• The pace of development — both bug hunting and introducing innovative features — has been ramped up even more than before (thanks to the 'lost' Sansar team, which came back to use their knowledge to improve SL...), which means that the 'partnership' between content producers and LL's own developers, which built this fantastic environment together, is just going to be able to improve the overall look & feel of SL. Even the goal of getting this social virtual world to have the kind of photorealism achieved by contemporary Triple-A games doesn't seem to be so impossible as it once did: the gap is closing, slowly, but inexorably...

Thus, yet again, SL managed to evade the prophets of Doom, reinvented itself, and is far better than ever before, in all regards (well, except for expensive land... but we're going to be stuck with that for many, many years).

I cannot even predict what will come next. The overhaul of pushing everything into the cloud consumed a lot of human resources, as well as the on-going work on Experiences, EEP, and Making Meshes Great Again. I'd think that the next two stages would be to take the advantage of cloud computing to offer more complex pricing on land, e.g. giving residents the ability to have the ability to lease 'low-end' computing power for 'limited homesteads', and having a slider to increase performance (affecting LI and the amount of avatars that can be in the same region), at an increase in the monthly fee. This would allow residents to choose to pay what they can afford according to their needs: maybe they want to host around-the-clock parties with hundreds of avatars in the same region — but don't need many prims for props — while others might prefer to have lots of LI-heavy content, but know that they won't be visited continuously by vast amounts of residents. Imagine that you could start paying as little as US$50 for a whole region (with a lot of limitation) but push the slider up to $500/month, for high-end regions such as shops where you need both a lot of available content as well as getting tons of visitors all the time. This kind of flexibility would be very interesting as a business model — and since it ties directly to costs, with little effort from LL, it might even work out fine in the end. Another possibility would be for estate owners to sort of 'distribute' resources among many regions, according to the needs. For instance, imagine a mostly residential estate, requiring plenty of content, but being rather empty most of the time; but at some times, the estate owner will host special events which are well-attended by lots of avatars. It would be logical (and much more cost-effective!) if the estate owner could decide to allocate more resources to a single region — where the event is going to happen — but reduce the amount of available CPU, memory, etc. on the remaining regions, while still paying the same every month. This would give estate managers a higher degree of fine-tuning which, in turn, would also allow them to reduce costs and eventually pass them along to their own rentals...

The other Big Project™, of course, could simply be another attempt to get SL to work in a browser  and, by extension, on mobile platforms. This is the kind of thing attempted every 5 years or so (using different techniques, including streaming video) and that ultimately fails at some stage. However, things have improved thanks to amazing new technologies deployed on the browser side, such as WebGL 2.0, which follows closely the OpenGL standard (used to develop the SL viewer engine), and can even use hand-crafted shaders developed for OpenGL (SL includes those as well). Of course, it would mean porting most of the C# code to JavaScript, but these days there are so many options to automatically generate JavaScript (even JS supporting WebGL!) out of C# code that I'm sure LL would have no trouble picking up one of those fancy tools (most are free and open-source anyway) to 'javascriptify' their code. Granted, this is not the work of a weekend; if it were that simple, we would have by now tons of third-party viewers running in JavaScript. Clearly there is more to it than simply outputting valid JavaScript code from the C# source code. Nevertheless, I think that this Big Project™ is finally do-able: all the pieces have come together, and we're a long way since the early attempts of drawing meshes on the browser's canvas — now we have lots of frameworks to do that so efficiently that they can be used to run first-person shooter games. So we know it's possible. Will LL take the challenge? Only time will tell...

[Qie Niangao]

This all seems pretty confused, but doesn't really seem to be irony, so...

1 hour ago, Gwyneth Llewelyn said:

The pace of development — both bug hunting and introducing innovative features — has been ramped up even more than before (thanks to the 'lost' Sansar team, which came back to use their knowledge to improve SL...)

On what evidence is this assertion based? I mean, the Map — the basic in-world Map, FFS — has been broken since at least November, apparently with a sole, ever-so-talented developer working full time (?) on replacing old platform-specific code. I mean, sure, maybe it's technically challenging, but it's a pretty fundamental function for the platform to be missing all these months if there were such a wealth of resources at hand.

1 hour ago, Gwyneth Llewelyn said:

It also means a much better management of resources: at long last, idle regions (and we know that the vast majority of them will be idle almost all the time — just storing content until eventually someone passes nearby to see it) will not waste CPU and memory, but will be 'activated on demand' if and when the need arises.

Maybe someday, but I don't think there's any change at all here yet, and to get much benefit would require a substantial re-architecting of the sim code. There has long been an idle-region feature that reduces the amount of processing for regions that are really idle (and those aren't that common because the slightest http traffic can keep them awake) by chopping the frame rate, which might be a starting point, but there's a long, expensive development effort before a true "sim-on-demand" feature can be offered, and then only with strict constraints on the content hosted on those sims (e.g., no physics- nor script-driven state updates while "idle").

It's not that I think the end of the world is nigh, and in fact I'm confident that a committed owner could unleash substantial growth and financial reward from a rejuvenated Second Life; there's hope that may happen now, but I'm not seeing it bearing fruit just yet — nor would I really expect it to.

[Coffee Pancake]

1 hour ago, Gwyneth Llewelyn said:

t's two years later (or so), six months after the last post before mine. A lot has happened:

• Sansar was shut down (and all staff — including the precious developers! — came back to work on SL instead. It shows!)

Sansar wasn't shut down, It reached an all time concurrent player peek of 221, Linden Lab fired over 20 staff connected to Sansar, then sold what was left off to wookey. Sansar still lives and AFAIK some Lindens alumni work there

https://ryanschultz.com/2020/02/11/linden-lab-lays-off-40-staff-shuts-down-the-sansar-project/

https://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2020/03/torley-w-second-life-sansar-linden-lab.html

 

1 hour ago, Gwyneth Llewelyn said:

• High Fidelity gave up on its own virtual world, and are now doing some kind of voice chat thingy (Philip Rosedale got his [small] fortune selling one of the first Internet-based videoconferencing system to RealNetworks)

High Fidelity is a spin off of one the technological rabbit holes they went down developing HiFi, good spatial audio.

It seems like the goal is to license that tech.

1 hour ago, Gwyneth Llewelyn said:

• Linden Lab was sort-of-acquired (well, they technically did get acquired, it's just that it wasn't a nefarious takeover where the new owners would squeeze the company dry and shut it down...) and has established themselves for the long haul, no matter what the future might bring — with their current profits and the always-welcome tapping of unlimited extra money from their new owners, they're safe for another decade or four, even if they continue to lose a slight number of users every month...

Linden Lab was totally bought, our new overlords immediately got to work rebranding and staffing Tilia. We have seen neither hide nor hair of them. Which probably means they have no idea what to do with us so are doing ... nothing. Which isn't good.

Future uncertain, but there is now a giant bear in the room eating our friend. Maybe if we all stand really still and just talk in IM .. OH WAIT.

1 hour ago, Gwyneth Llewelyn said:

• The 'push to the cloud' is almost finished, or possibly has already happened, and that basically means that LL will never face a 'lack of land' ever again. It also means a much better management of resources: at long last, idle regions (and we know that the vast majority of them will be idle almost all the time — just storing content until eventually someone passes nearby to see it) will not waste CPU and memory, but will be 'activated on demand' if and when the need arises. Storage on the cloud is cheap (and fail-proof — no more loss of data!), computing resources are not, but since LL will consume CPU/memory only what they need it, it means that their overall operation will cost much, much less than before, and scale much more easily than before (just click on a backoffice button, launch a new instance of a region simulator, and off you go). It's not likely that LL will reduce the prices, though; the massive cost reduction is basically a safeguard for the future, as eventually more private regions are abandoned; in the meantime, the extra profits accruing from the cost reduction will make investors happy and give LL an opportunity to stash some money in the bank for the 'bad days' ahead (assuming that there will be bad days, of course...).

Oh god.

The cloud is costing more than the old datacenter did. Regions are not spinning down when idle .. and just imagine the out cry if they did. People are paying  high prices for an always on service. Cost cuts passed on to consumers can't happen without service cuts.

I will be unironically selling pitchforks in my store sometime around SL18B.

There be dragons ahead. Big ones.

1 hour ago, Gwyneth Llewelyn said:

• The pace of development — both bug hunting and introducing innovative features — has been ramped up even more than before (thanks to the 'lost' Sansar team, which came back to use their knowledge to improve SL...),

It hasn't and they haven't.

1 hour ago, Gwyneth Llewelyn said:

• which means that the 'partnership' between content producers and LL's own developers, which built this fantastic environment together, is just going to be able to improve the overall look & feel of SL. Even the goal of getting this social virtual world to have the kind of photorealism achieved by contemporary Triple-A games doesn't seem to be so impossible as it once did: the gap is closing, slowly, but inexorably...

Can I have some of what you're smoking?

SL is further away from the required render and pipeline upgrades than ever before and there are no signs of life on the horizon. All projects are still at the "talk about it" and ask "but what about users who can't run vulkan" stage, right where they have been since last year. 

1 hour ago, Gwyneth Llewelyn said:

Thus, yet again, SL managed to evade the prophets of Doom, reinvented itself, and is far better than ever before, in all regards (well, except for expensive land... but we're going to be stuck with that for many, many years).

It's entirely unchanged, and there is now a BEAR IN THE ROOM.

 

1 hour ago, Gwyneth Llewelyn said:

I cannot even predict what will come next.

Not really doing a good job of just accounting what's happened.

1 hour ago, Gwyneth Llewelyn said:

The overhaul of pushing everything into the cloud consumed a lot of human resources, as well as the on-going work on Experiences, EEP, and Making Meshes Great Again. I'd think that the next two stages would be to take the advantage of cloud computing to offer more complex pricing on land, e.g. giving residents the ability to have the ability to lease 'low-end' computing power for 'limited homesteads', and having a slider to increase performance (affecting LI and the amount of avatars that can be in the same region), at an increase in the monthly fee. This would allow residents to choose to pay what they can afford according to their needs: maybe they want to host around-the-clock parties with hundreds of avatars in the same region — but don't need many prims for props — while others might prefer to have lots of LI-heavy content, but know that they won't be visited continuously by vast amounts of residents. Imagine that you could start paying as little as US$50 for a whole region (with a lot of limitation) but push the slider up to $500/month, for high-end regions such as shops where you need both a lot of available content as well as getting tons of visitors all the time. This kind of flexibility would be very interesting as a business model

Always on regions we have no for $300

vs

Pay for a region by usage $50 to $500 !! ($500 is the $300 region you had before)

That's going to sell so well.

 

1 hour ago, Gwyneth Llewelyn said:

The other Big Project™, of course, could simply be another attempt to get SL to work in a browser  and

There is a TPV doing this unconnected to Linden Lab.

1 hour ago, Gwyneth Llewelyn said:

by extension, on mobile platforms.

Mobile is underdevelopment by LindenLab. I have the Apple alpha on my phone.

It's somewhat crude, logs you in only when it has focus and allows basic messaging.

 

1 hour ago, Gwyneth Llewelyn said:

Of course, it would mean porting most of the C# code to JavaScript, but these days there are so many options to automatically generate JavaScript (even JS supporting WebGL!) out of C# code that I'm sure LL would have no trouble picking up one of those fancy tools (most are free and open-source anyway) to 'javascriptify' their code.

The SL viewer is written in C++

This is not the same as C#

Javascript is why we can't have nice things and everyone's data ends up on the darkweb. Lets not.

 

1 hour ago, Gwyneth Llewelyn said:

now we have lots of frameworks to do that so efficiently that they can be used to run first-person shooter games. So we know it's possible. Will LL take the challenge? Only time will tell...

FPS games. On the SL architecture. 

This is literally why they started Sansar. 

 

 

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

35 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

the Map — the basic in-world Map, FFS — has been broken since at least November, apparently with a sole, ever-so-talented developer working full time (?) on replacing old platform-specific code. I mean, sure, maybe it's technically challenging, but it's a pretty fundamental function

I imagine this being a very complex and underestimated problem that needs very delicate and thoughtful handling. And I can relate to the public pressure. I wish the tech mouse/mice at LL lots of luck and success in fixing the maps.

[bigmoe Whitfield]

Also to make sure people are aware,  it's been said by oz linden that pricing for the near to far future will not be changing,  aws costs more than their physical data center did at this time.

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

2 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

but doesn't really seem to be irony,

There are several flavours of irony, such as red-hot tabasco that hits you before you've even swallowed, smooth-as-chocolate that slides down easy, and delayed-action medical-grade irony that you don't recognise until a few hour later when you wake up and think "Oh my word, they were being ironic!"

My take on the post is that if somebody took a break for a year of so and came back, this is what they'd see, an over-view without any of the lived-through-it details that colour our perceptions of what is going on.

I have to say I think they're glossing over lots of it but not in a way that requires a forum fatwah.

[ChinRey]

17 hours ago, Gwyneth Llewelyn said:

Thus, yet again, SL managed to evade the prophets of Doom, reinvented itself, and is far better than ever before, in all regards (well, except for expensive land... but we're going to be stuck with that for many, many years).

 

15 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

There be dragons ahead. Big ones.

I'm going to take the middle ground here. I sure don't see any of the big improvements Gwyneth talks about but nor do I see any fire belching dragons.

Picture a house - a nice house, a few decades old. It hasn't been painted for years but it doesn't look too shabby. Yes, that window latch is broken; nothing a piece of string can't fix. The bathroom is lovely, isn't it? The jacuzzi is only two years old and has never been used. We're going to hook it up to the plumbing anytime soon now. But don't forget to use the plunger after you've showered, we got a tiny little issue with the drainage there. Call a plumber? Nah! We're practical hands-on people who can fix things ourselves. Like that sagging floor that's the next big project as soon as we got a round tuit. We've already bought the new floorboards - that's the big stack of planks you had to navigate around in the hallway. The electric wiring? It works just fine; you just have to remember not to wash clothes while you're cooking because then you'll overload it. That broken power socket withe xposed lvie wires over there is nothing worth mentioning. Remember to stay away from it and you'll be fine. Here's the living room. Isn't that pink wallpaper with purple flowers gorgeous? It matches the hospital green ceiling so well too. That picture on the wall over there? Yes it's a strange place to hang it but it hides a nasty stain that's lying there. Why the freezer is in the living room? It was the only place there was enough room for it after we converted the basement to a billiard room. Oh yes, the billiard room, let me show you. (Careful with the stairs, the third step has come loose somehow). Here it is! Let me clear away these cardboard boxes and old magazines so you can see the table. It's a bit cramped down here so you can't actually cue without hitting a wall but it's such a great feature - it's details like this that puts it a notch above your average house.

Picture this and you have the perfect metaphor for Second Life. It's a nice and cozy place for those who are used to it and familiar with its quirks  and it still has decades of life in it.

Edited March 22, 2021 by ChinRey

[Chic Aeon]

7 hours ago, Gwyneth Llewelyn said:

Sansar was shut down (and all staff — including the precious developers! — came back to work on SL instead. It shows!)

That is incorrect.  There WAS a layoff long before Sansar was sold to Wookey. A few (a very few  announced publicly) went back to SL. Others were just out of work.  When Sansar sold to Wookey (it has NEVER CLOSED) many of the Lindens stayed on and one of the Sansar favorites is now back in Sansar (from SL).  

 

Sansar under Wookey changed DIRECTION but the builds and product are all still there and very much of the same citizenship.   So it definitely didn't shut down.  

 

And I  agree with Qie that things aren't "ramping up".  So very many things that have been broken (map, inventory search, web search for a few) are still broken after many months. The destination guide was finally fixed but apparently not counting correctly. EEP was fixed a bit for specular but other things are still very wrong.   The absence of changes may be one reason why the Firestorm was able to make their 3 month viewer update goal FOR THE FIRST TIME.     

 

I am happy we are still here. But I definitely don't see what the the person who resurrected  this thread sees. 

Edited March 21, 2021 by Chic Aeon
grammar and incorrect name

[Doris Johnsky]

I've seen y'all  say "LL was bought out".  By whom?

[Sylvia Tamalyn]

6 minutes ago, Doris Johnsky said:

I've seen y'all  say "LL was bought out".  By whom?

 

[Sid Nagy]

The sky has been falling since I joined in 2007.
That has been 14 years now.
SL is still around.

Tin foiled hats anyone?

Edited March 21, 2021 by Sid Nagy
Zpellink

[Rowan Amore]

5 minutes ago, Sid Nagy said:

The sky has been falling since I joined in 2007.
That has been 14 years now.
SL is still around.

Tin foiled hats anyone?

 

[Janet Voxel]

[Coffee Pancake]

8 hours ago, ChinRey said:

I'm going to take the middle ground here. I sure don't see any of the big improvements Gwyneth talks about but nor do I see any fire belching dragons.

Gwyneth is living in a parallel reality.

8 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Picutre this and you have the perfect metaphor for Second Life. It's a nice and cozy place for those who are used to it and familiar with its quirks  and it still has decades of life in it.

SL's userbase is aging and the rate of new users doesn't offset the losses. It hasn't for years.

SL in the cloud and should now scale down much further before minimum operating costs start to bite. A slow decline while we're milked for every last penny. ... That's not much of a future to hope for or look forward to.

The focus of LL's new owners very much appears to be Tilia. I expect a burst of promotion for SL (aimed mostly at us) an initial public mobile client, tech journos contemplating SL refusal to die yet again, everyone holding their breath followed by a hard slump when it turns out ticking a box doesn't change anything (just like ticking the cloud rendering box, or any of the boxes from the last decade didn't change anything).

I for one would very much welcome our new overlords bursting in here with a grand outline for the future, a little vision, some encouraging lies, a simple hello ... but they haven't. Not a single word from anyone.

[Finite]

 My only gripe is that the sims can't seemingly manage 35-50 players. Basically the same cap we had back in 2010. But visually and creatively the game has been getting much better. I can easily see how people who sit in their plots of land chatting with friends in IM and surfing the marketplace wouldn't notice but if you actually get out and explore there's quite a virtual world out there.

[Lindal Kidd]

2 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

I for one would very much welcome our new overlords bursting in here with a grand outline for the future, a little vision, some encouraging lies, a simple hello ... but they haven't. Not a single word from anyone.

Perhaps in this case "no news is good news."

[Prokofy Neva]

28 minutes ago, Lindal Kidd said:

Perhaps in this case "no news is good news."

So the new owner, or at least one of the new owners, is called "OberWolf Linden" as we can learn from this interview with Patch.

So I sent him a) some wolf snacks b) a "wipe your paws" welcome mat" c) a dragon magic food bowl I made which contains adaptable wolf food AND a "human needle" which you use for sewing up your own wounds when you didn't follow the feeding instructions properly.

 

[Prokofy Neva]

3 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Gwyneth is living in a parallel reality.

SL's userbase is aging and the rate of new users doesn't offset the losses. It hasn't for years.

SL in the cloud and should now scale down much further before minimum operating costs start to bite. A slow decline while we're milked for every last penny. ... That's not much of a future to hope for or look forward to.

The focus of LL's new owners very much appears to be Tilia. I expect a burst of promotion for SL (aimed mostly at us) an initial public mobile client, tech journos contemplating SL refusal to die yet again, everyone holding their breath followed by a hard slump when it turns out ticking a box doesn't change anything (just like ticking the cloud rendering box, or any of the boxes from the last decade didn't change anything).

I for one would very much welcome our new overlords bursting in here with a grand outline for the future, a little vision, some encouraging lies, a simple hello ... but they haven't. Not a single word from anyone.

So, in the long term perspective the old Lindens always had, and which the new Lindens have adapted, heavy things like "sims" (regions) or even "software production" are hard to scale and require a lot of investment. Anyone who owns a boat knows that it is "a hole in the water into which you pour money", and in the same way, a sim is "a hole in the Internet into which you pour money," and the Lindens have 28,000 of them. Even putting them in the cloud, they are work/expense.

So they all have this dream that if they just tax content sales, or sell content, or sell the hook-up of sims, or sell the download which you use to run your own sim without them - and jettison the sale/rental of servers or "land" -- that then they can scale and make bank.

This explains their traditional adversity to Land. Land was an afterthought, built to test The Rig, if you read their history; they liked to blow up things and delete it and shape it randomly. When they made the Mainland, they had a grander vision of people living together in communes or communities and learning and sharing, but then went astray, they didn't want to be in the governance business, so they let the "white flight" to the suburbs (private islands) take over. Eventually, fast forward, they developed these priorities: 1) private islands -- that's 90% of their product sales 2) Linden Homes - premiums can go there and have a better governed experience and be easier to govern with software-coded rules and staff-enforced norms; 3) Education. Maybe "business" will be added on if they do mega sims or your own sim or whatever.

These priorities were still to be "phased out" if I understood correctly, because eventually people could just buy their own sim hookup -- they would live off the content sales exclusively, and "white label" use of their software by business and government (they had the "Nebraska" program). They retired the sale of entire mainland sims via auction years ago. Curiously, despite the pandemic opportunity, they decided not to sell new sims and have a complicated excuse for that. But it fits with the long-term goal of freeing humankind from land which the Lindens have always had, and which has always been articulated by SL Hamlet and their other spokespersons. Governance in games is hard and expensive, people don't get along, they constantly test the limits, so the "Your World, Your Imagination" slogan of earlier years gave way to "we're selling a  platform" to get it away from any notion of "world" that they "run". They do still run mini-worlds in a way, with their concentration on Bellisseria, and their more scattered attention to the Mainland. But basically, it doesn't scale. It can't scale. You're not working with a "nation of shopkeepers" or a "melting pot" or a "gorgeous mosaic" but a huge, unwieldy, atomized, at times extremist world population prone to QAnon type belief infections".

So...What's NOT on that list is "Mainland", i.e. "buy a parcel from our auction or another resident or request abandoned land and live there or start a business for less than you pay for homestead/islands".

I've written on this at length but it boils down to: 1) a plan of benign neglect or 2) an aggressive plan of deleting Mainland, including old Linden Homes once actually referred to as a kind of Mainland and driving everyone to the other three options. 

As been pointed out, people still live in those old Linden Homes and don't know deletion is in their future. And there are really nice build their like the dragon and quest under it -- what will happen to them? Maybe they are considered too "old school". 

90% of staff governance time is probably spent on Mainland griefing. So in a way it makes sense to remove this griefed, blighted mess of Mainland -- the caricature everyone has who in fact doesn't actually till the soil there. At best, Mainland is a thing you see like on a safari, in a "pod tour" which you keep running rider-free over the natives' land in between your jaunts there occasionally.

Except...some of us do live and work on the Mainland, and do enjoy its freedoms and serendipities and delights and have worked around the blight and griefing successfully, perhaps because we are "masochists" as Mitch Kapor once called us.

So I plan to ask Wendi at the Moncierge meeting on Wed what, if any, is the plan for the Mainland, long term. I forget whether "Moncierge" is a portmanteau for "Mainland and "Concierge" or even if "Mainland" is under her purview, I'll find out.

 

Edited March 22, 2021 by Prokofy Neva

[ChinRey]

3 hours ago, Finite said:

I can easily see how people who sit in their plots of land chatting with friends in IM and surfing the marketplace wouldn't notice but if you actually get out and explore there's quite a virtual world out there.

But it's people who sit in their plots of land chatting with friends in IM and surfing the marketplace who are LL's target market for SL! Except it would be great if they would tp to a club every now and then too.