How SL can win the metaverse

[Evangeline Arcadia]

4 hours ago, Marigold Devin said:

 Zuckerberg doesn't realise how many of FB's users are already only hanging by the most tenuous of threads. I

 

I have to disagree with this - despite hearing numerous people saying how much they dislike FB, the fact is it is still a main player in social media and online communities, with millions of users who are not going to quit it any time soon. Losing even a handful  million users  isn't much of a dent to it's user base....so...

3 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

The worry is that he creates a monster that rolls over and crushes us while sleep walking to failure.

 

....I am concerned about this too. If they develop a  'Metaverse' that is even reasonably successful ..well...that is just an awful prospect in my opinion for so many reasons that should be clear to anyone who has followed FB's history of antics and ethics over the past 10 years...

[Lancewae Barrowstone]

The only way to understand the calculus of this discussion (FB and its "metaverse") is to realize that SL is the Soho of the '50s.  It's the Greenwich village of modern cyberspace -- the artists colony of 1930's (and earlier) Paris filled with writers and painters and poets at work.  SL is alive and well, in that spirit, and the art (the creations!) they just never stop!  It's nothing short of amazing.  It is one of a kind (a Classic as I have said in past posts), and Zuck can't magically reproduce that.  He's not even aiming for that.  Sure, he will come along and build his modern highrise amalgams all around it -- his new so-called "metaverse", but that's hype, that's salesmanship.  Fine.  He's not going to be creating an SL clone, nor even any competition to it.  His bland concept cannot destroy creative communities nor recreate them.  Nor can he destroy their space, in this instance. He's not a realestate developeer. He's strictly social media, where real day-to-day people in their bathrobes and slippers sit and chat with family and friends and keep everyone updated. In past generations grandma used to write letters, then later she would  be on the phone (still so today) and now she can use the FB platform for instaneous postings at any time.  So, what is a cool new "avatar" in some kind of new FB metaverse going to do for her?  Like....oh look, grandma has a new avatar!  Boy, look at her!  Or, hey... business meetings can be held online with our own avatars in the FB metaverse.  Oh! what will Putin be.  The world is poised on edge to know! 

No, Zucky can't willy-nilly duplicate the special spirit of the creators' colony.  And he won't even try -- why should he?  He created and hosts a giantic social platform built on text and photos and will now add, ...what?..., moving avatars?  His idea is the Ma Bell of mid-20th century, come to change the world, and yes, that technology was transformative, and it went to Paris and New York, and San Francisco, and yet, did it diminish/displace the arts?  Did it shrink and shrivel that spirit?  Oh, hell no.  Because the two aren't related.  It may be that his conception of an integrated metaverse includes adding in the little neighborhoods, this cyber Soho and others. If so, that's fine.  Just another doorway in. Another passage down a unique cobblestoe street.  

SL need not move toward the ideas of Zuck. His thinking is a playtoy.  His view, that future corporate meetings will allow attendees -- magnates of industry  and governments-- to simply represent themselves with a placeholder avatar in an animated boardroom of Zuck's new metaverse platform? ... O Glory!  No, the thing about social media is that even gamers who are followed on Twitch by the thousands of subscribers & viewers, while playing in-character game avatsrs, yet, they will turn ON their cams to their REAL in-person faces, sitting at their keyboards wile playing, and why?  Because their viewers want that.  THAT is the real point.  Zuck's platform and his new avatars will not displace the desire, the need, to link the two, the necessity to see the real face of that party you are negotiating with.  Soo, the metaverse only becomes a way to share videos and display slides to a single chatting group.  Ohhkay..  REAL business, like REAL family is not the realm of fantasy and creation.  It can't be. 

So, can Zuck build his metaverse and even get some people to use it.  Sure he can.  It's never gonna be "Soho."  So.., we can assume it's not meant to be.  Just an added income stream to the Zuck empire -- 'cause... he sure knows how to sell.  And that's fine. 

 

 

[Mr Amore]

4 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Opensim != SL Infrastructure in the same way Gimp != Photoshop.

As it stands, Opensim is a backwater for people who have been banned from SL for *that* or who wish to participate in *that* without a ban.

If it was even half the things you claim it to be, it would be bigger and more active than SL. It's never come close.

Modern SL grid infrastructure has come on a long way since the dark days of string, sticky tape and the asset server being down.

The SL grid infrastructure also has all of us attached to it.

Web pages are aging technology.

The internet's history is littered with the corpses of excellent technologies that failed to achieve ubiquity.

Mostly due to the lure of microtransactions .. which we've had since day one.

Much of the problems SL presents getting into the mobile space are asset management based, the mobile platform just doesn't have the horsepower to do all the on-the-fly collection and assembly the standard desktop viewer spends all its time doing. This is something that needs to be solved server side. An open access grid based on standards defined by LL would present a blank slate for mobile development and allow for that problem to be solved independent of LL.

A simple example would a mobile proxy region that assembles and bakes content from a regular region into something tailored specifically to the limitations presented by a mobile device. This would of course come with some serious limitations to SL functionality from accessing devices, however is anyone on a cell phone really going to creating content.

The SL viewer presents itself as a relic, it's very easy to look at how little the UI has advanced and assume that's the viewer.

If Animats puts the stock Linden UI over the top of his vulkan render pipeline, it's going to be in the same boat. It might run better, but that alone isn't sufficient to for it to be perceived as a major advancement by non technical end users.

That's a perceptual misconception. The SL grid has undergone significant platform advancement over the years.

But from an end users perspective that's like putting a better database on a website, no one see's the database.

As someone who's been here since the early days, SL is night and day different, It now does just work. The grid isn't down, content delivery problems have gone away, outages are rare, it's faster and smoother than it's ever been. But it still looks like SL and is used like SL ... which is more of an us problem than LL.

It's really time for us to be more specific about what platform advancement should actually look like from an end users perspective.

A good example would the rumblings of PBR on the horizon. PBR would be a major step forward for content creators and 3D production workflows. Will average bob see a huge difference in world .. probably not. 

 

What is the number one activity in SL? I don't have the answer but I'm going to speculate it's shopping for those spanking new mesh heads, bodies and homes. SL is a dress up and dollhouse simulator - If this is all SL wants to be, it needn't change anything.

Microtransactions, gachas and collectibles have been injected into PC games too, but they're still eclipsed by mobile gaming. New MMOs are being developed exclusively for mobile because they're very capable little machines now. Roblox, Fortnite, PUBG, Black Desert, CoD, ARK, and many others have made the transition from PC to mobile. PUBG mobile has games of 100 players on an 8km x 8km map, almost the equivalent area of 1024 sims.

SL was designed before mobile gaming was a factor. It's now 20 years later, and I'm of the opinion LL needs to begin anew with modern technologies in mind.

Yes, SL has modernized under the hood, but it's the equivalent of upgrading a lame donkey to a mule. It's still pulling the same cart with cramped conditions inside, new passengers hop on, look around aghast and drop out. Old passengers are creaking along reminiscing over the good old times when it was the shiniest new cart in town.

What you call advancements, are what I'd call fixes which shouldn't have ever existed. Maybe LL can add a working search and fix teleport disconnects as new features?

PBR would be great, but as you say it doesn't revolutionize the end user experience. Which has been largely the same since the 2000's.

If SL wants to be a model for the modern metaverse, it needs a complete redesign from the way avatars dress, from how sims are created and hosted and how the world is rendered.  And that's just a bare minimum to begin with.

 

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

1 hour ago, Mr Amore said:

 

What is the number one activity in SL? I don't have the answer but I'm going to speculate it's shopping for those spanking new mesh heads, bodies and homes. SL is a dress up and dollhouse simulator - If this is all SL wants to be, it needn't change anything.

Forgot one of the biggest thing in SL --- Music. Both live performers and DJs prevail in world.

[Coffee Pancake]

5 hours ago, Mr Amore said:

What is the number one activity in SL? I don't have the answer but I'm going to speculate it's shopping for those spanking new mesh heads, bodies and homes. SL is a dress up and dollhouse simulator - If this is all SL wants to be, it needn't change anything.

It's not even that complicated, the most common activity is social interactions, chatter & hanging out.

Everything else is just a route to that.

This is one of the fundamental missteps made by Sansar, they figured the club and the DJ were the point, when really they only exist to provide a back drop for the social aspects. Something Sansar was seriously deficient in.

 

5 hours ago, Mr Amore said:

SL was designed before mobile gaming was a factor. It's now 20 years later, and I'm of the opinion LL needs to begin anew with modern technologies in mind.

Modern 'gaming' technologies is kind of a cul-de-sac. Games are created to present a streamlined series of assets to a graphics card that in turn has been designed to accelerate that very specific use case. It's just a happy accident that GPU cores can be tasked with other jobs.

This presents a problem for a platform like SL, much of the fundamental ad-hoc creativity we take for granted (even the simple stuff) isn't built around that catch22.

A modern SL wouldn't be able to work like SL, it would be .. Sansar, had that ever been finished.

MMO's are in many ways analogous to virtual worlds, especially ones like WoW or FFVIV, and while they can tick a lot of the boxes SL ticks, there are some they can never touch, sadly those are the things that make SL what it is.

 

5 hours ago, Mr Amore said:

Yes, SL has modernized under the hood, but it's the equivalent of upgrading a lame donkey to a mule. It's still pulling the same cart with cramped conditions inside, new passengers hop on, look around aghast and drop out. Old passengers are creaking along reminiscing over the good old times when it was the shiniest new cart in town.

Oldbies are more reminiscent of the times when they had clout, this is not something SL alone has to deal with. Plenty of big game based platforms have a similar desire for 'the good old times' as can be seen by the rise of WoW classic.

There is no way to recapture those days without moving to an entirely new platform .. which will then inevitably grow and change repeating the cycle.

5 hours ago, Mr Amore said:

What you call advancements, are what I'd call fixes which shouldn't have ever existed. Maybe LL can add a working search and fix teleport disconnects as new features?

SL is a complex system that presents myriad ways for things to interact and weirdness to happen. In a way, the fact weirdness can happen is a good sign, even if it's a pain in the backside.

5 hours ago, Mr Amore said:

PBR would be great, but as you say it doesn't revolutionize the end user experience. Which has been largely the same since the 2000's.

If SL wants to be a model for the modern metaverse, it needs a complete redesign from the way avatars dress, from how sims are created and hosted and how the world is rendered.  And that's just a bare minimum to begin with.

But again, that leads to something that fundamentally isn't SL. It's Sansar, or Blue Mars, or any of the other dead worlds.

Sansar ticked all of the boxes you're listing and did so in very well thought out and modern ways.

[Maryanne Solo]

18 hours ago, Alwin Alcott said:

i'v seen this process with a total different program ..add this .. add that.. moved from a broad userbase to only specialists are able to use it at full, had to raise the price dramaticly and left with less than 25% of their best days .. many give it a year or at most two, and it will be gone. Changing SL to much and allianate the older userbase, will have consequences the fast youth has a lot less in their wallet to spend and are faster gone than a leave in the wind when they get bored.

😨😭
B b...bbb...but what if SL had... like... a mobile viewer/mode and also a PC developer mode?
Switching mode for format detected? 
That could be an easy way to work it out perhaps? 🙄
I've only ever selected these options in point and click web page designers like Wordpress commercial for example, I have never
manually coded pages this way.
There's got to be an easy solution out there to taking years of LL's meta magic and plonking it into here and now.
Filters, throttles, leg removers 😂 ->Retailer/NFT mode/shop mode, live chat room mode, live dance party/dance animation synch mode, movie watching mode...... 
The detection work regarding "device type" is already being performed a squillion times an hour.
C'mon LL you can do it!    

Edited November 11, 2021 by Maryanne Solo

[Arielle Popstar]

15 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Opensim != SL Infrastructure in the same way Gimp != Photoshop.

As it stands, Opensim is a backwater for people who have been banned from SL for *that* or who wish to participate in *that* without a ban.

If it was even half the things you claim it to be, it would be bigger and more active than SL. It's never come close.

If it was actually the case, then you are bringing forth about the best counter to your own argument that S/L should opensource. Quite a few see that just opensourcing the viewer as the cause of much of the DRM and copyright issues within S/L. Now you want the Lab to give up its last vestige of control and opensource the server code too? S/L will be overrun by those previously banned, socialists, opensource advocates and the everything free crowd. This surely will turn out well!

[Theresa Tennyson]

19 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

In the context of this thread I would point to Opensim's server architecture options along with its hypergrid capability, which as you know allows greatly expanded capability by allowing teleports between independent, standalone grids, so much so that in theory it could allow 7.5 billion people interconnectedness in virtual 3d worlds. Not all in one place at the same time but at least allows for the visiting between hypergrid capable grids and standalones running on even old laptops etc.

 

  

Then it's useless as a teats on a boar hog. What would you think of the Internet if when you tried to access a web page your browser said, "Sorry, the page is full?"

[Arielle Popstar]

34 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

Then it's useless as a teats on a boar hog. What would you think of the Internet if when you tried to access a web page your browser said, "Sorry, the page is full?"

You are a lucky person or don't get out much if you've never hit a website that was too busy to serve you pages. Same as any region on the grid that has a big sale or event going on.

[Prokofy Neva]

On 11/10/2021 at 1:04 AM, Coffee Pancake said:

SL works because it parallels early internet design principals, it's very easy to see how at launch, this was perceived as the next stepping stone for the wider internet .. 18 years ahead of it's time.

We can expect to see all the new metaverse hype to repeat all the same mistakes made by Sansar and the other sterile worlds that have come and gone before, although due to platform leverage, they will all be bigger than SL.

Sansar wasn't an upgrade, it was a do over with the lessons learnt from SL applied to modern game platform design. Sansar was intended to be SL 2.0, the design goals were such that it was predicted SL could conceivably be created inside Sansar .. yet it turned out to be yet another dead sterile world nobody cared to invest time in, that ended up almost tanking the company and taking a lot of very senior staff with it.

There is a very real risk we will end up crushed by an upstart colossal failure from FB etc. By their scales, a world with a population a hundred times the size of SL will still be a massive failure. Such a platform however will suck out a lot of the oxygen  and we can only stand to lose a certain percentage before the scales tip and we face irrelevance.

It's with this in mind that I propose what I see as the only viable long term solution.

Ubiquity. 

LL need to pivot from operating a walled garden to being the metaverse's broker. Open source the server code, let people run it on anything, and for a fee, allow it to become part of the SL grid with access to it's currency, markets, assets and DRM.

SL as a platform doesn't need to be the best, or the biggest, it simply needs to be everywhere.

Open source growth of the platform will kick back into advancement of the platform. So long as a 3rd party simulator operates by the required grid & client connectivity protocols, there is no reason why it can't be radically different from the fixed offering we have today and that raising tide will lift all ships. Run the LL server, opensim or roll your own to your own needs and specifications.

Other companies could and should be encouraged to offer their own brokerage services, their own asset libraries, grids and currencies. Simulators could connect to multiple grid services and offer combined services to end users. LL backed by Tilia enter the field with a massive head start and home field advantage. A far cry from the impending messaverse we're about to witness.

We can not depend on FB's (etc) inevitable flubs, failures, scandals and miss steps to leave us unscathed. Yes it's going to be a trash fire and we can poke fun from the peanut gallery, but to not take the changing landscape as an existential threat would be a fatal blunder.

There is of course a couple of big elephants in the room to address, that being concerns over DRM, piracy and scalability.

Piracy as a behavior is inevitable, it happens inside SL already, and would naturally increase should the walls come down. However, as with all forms of media piracy observed to date, the overall impact can be limited by strong controls over access to the grid infrastructure. Profitability demands legitimacy and accountability and that will put pressure simulator operators to keep their houses in order lest they find themselves out in the cold. Platform growth will also do much to limit the overall impact. It's also important to note we're not powerless and unable to push back.

Scalability is a key issue and bigger concern in this plan, as we are all painfully aware certain parts of the SL platform do not uniformly scale (group chat being a notable example we're all familiar with, there are others). All parts of the LL service as broker must scale in the same way the wider internet scales, and again, LL have the advantage over competing grids in that they already know all the pinch points and have almost 2 decades experience.

 

We win by becoming Apache, or nginx, or MySQL or email. Built on a set of open standards accessible to all. 

And by Win, I mean survive.

Cory Linden left because he wanted to open the server code back in 2006 I believe, and was looking the other way when libsl reverse-engineered the viewer code, which should have been punished under the TOS against reverse engineering.

Philip then opened up the Viewer code, libsl was blessed, they went on to perpetrate copybot and many other things; today some of the worst of them work at Intel and Cory is VP of engineering at FB. Just as an aside.

But Philip held off opening up the server code, despite pressure from a small coterie of "cosmic engineers" and such, because he wasn't stupid; that was the money maker, that kept people like Pierre Omidyaar and Mitch Kapor still on board. Mitch Kapor was happy to liberate other people's code and lamented that Lotus 1-2-3 wasn't open code only after he made his first stash from it. They understood that this was not a Creative Commons and FOSS junket. 

I personally opposed opening up the Viewer code as it spawned scores of griefers with rogue viewers, use of "god mode" for stalking etc. The Lindens think it was a plus because out of that wild west era we got Firestorm, which 90% of the user base uses, which is more popular, especially because it kept 1.23 search, which LL deprecated, made worse, got working, and then broke badly last year.

So I really don't think LL beats the Metaverse game by opening up the Server code so everybody and his brother can brew their own and put SL in their garage. If they do that, they might want to keep certain walled garden patches still walled, oh, that's why they came up with Bellisseria and might delete the Mainland. I'd say keep the Mainland, but that's just me.

But all this obsession with interoperability, liberating server code, running SL at home with LL just handling hook-ups (of the technical kind), the LindEx, and the Marketplace means that the vast experience LL acquired, almost in spite of itself, in the areas of governance and the economy gets stepped on and lost.

And I think the value LL brings to all this Metaverse stuff now -- the craze will pass -- is really governance and economy, not all the tech stuff, although WHEN the tech supports governance and economy, that's a good thing.

I'm for LL right now restoring some of its "best practices" of the past in these areas, namely: Police Blotter and Economic Statistics. For extra credit, make every police blotter filing open and transparent, so that every respondent can see the plaintiff as in RL court. The Lindens will only post blotters they took action on; but all postings would help to reduce all those spurious ones. Then the respondent has an opportunity before a jury of his peers to make his case in Metaverse Court. The Lindens actually had a system vaguely like that for a time, a kind of random jury. You would be called to be on a sort of jury duty in the mail. You would be given a report of a miscreant's deed, informed that he was about to be permabanned, and have an opportunity to give judgement on whether you felt that was necessary. Community based justice, imagine, like Native Americans and Solzhenitsyn's notion of Novgorod. 

But since all the names and identifying data was stripped out, most of the time you couldn't really make sense of it, and in any way, it was dropped.

The economic statistics were great as they showed categories of who spent $1, $25, $100 Lindens all the way up to like $50,000 or something. So you could see the population able and willing to spend US $25 on a 4096 rental was limited, but larger than you thought, so you could try entering that market and advertising in it. The market of the $5000 and up was so small that unless you made weapons or rented homesteads, etc. you would stay out of it. The number of premium accounts sold each month was also indicated.

But when THAT number stalled below 100,000, even as this incredible number of signups was listed like "3 million," they decided to scrap the whole thing. Pity.

The Lindens have forums that are more free than games (where you can never criticize the game company) but less free than Facebook itself. So to compete with Facebook, Linden would have to free its forums and allow allegations of wrongdoing naming names and companies to be made in a special complaints section which might also contain court reports. Then the accused could also make their case without being banned. Unless LL brings the forums up to speed at the basic level of a typical shopper, i.e. small community newspaper with mainly ads from stores and classifieds but also some basic news stories and a police blotter, it can't compete with a Metaverse increasingly based in RL.

The most important thing -- since they won't do any of these civic things I'm outlining -- is permissions and copyright. All these big companies care about their own copyright, but nobody else's. They all are in these gigantic lawsuits with each other, but if you are the little guy, you can't defend your IP against the big platforms' users, because of the "California Business Model," i.e. enable theft of copyrighted content so increase views and users. In SL, you can defend your IP. The permissions system helps you and Linden AR system helps you.

The tendency is to go towards having only licensed creators to supposedly "enable" or "assist" the DMCA process. But that's fake, it's only about removing cheap or shoddy content which is defined only by the eye of the beholder, which can be the Lindens and their friends.

The reason SL lasted and did as much good as it did is because it didn't really grow to 3 million or 10 million users actively participating, because of some cop show on TV that once had a tie-in here. That would have made it uninhabitable; it's bad enough with griefers and fraudsters. Keeping it small helped LL develop strategies to deal with governance, the greatest challenge of non-games in the 3D world with user content.

 

Edited November 11, 2021 by Prokofy Neva

[Theresa Tennyson]

1 hour ago, Arielle Popstar said:

You are a lucky person or don't get out much if you've never hit a website that was too busy to serve you pages. Same as any region on the grid that has a big sale or event going on.

Theresa Tennyson nods and smiles.

There are a few web pages that get slow occasionally when a few million people try to hit them at the same time.

Note the difference between "a few million" and "a hundred."

Edited November 11, 2021 by Theresa Tennyson

[Prokofy Neva]

22 hours ago, Katherine Heartsong said:

I suspect that the key here to what the "metaverse" actually is, as Coffee has eluded to, is some form of open/inter-operable set of "worlds".

The common standards need to be only a few ... how to connect/enter an individual world, how to fundamentally navigate/move through that space, what a physical object is, and what defines the representation of you (an avatar) in these worlds. The idea of being a broker of these sorts of things might fall to LL (hopefully not FB), but I see a lot of possibilities for many different entities to offer pieces of this reality that stay within the overall open guidelines, without any one company having to be the overall "owner".

You might get dozens of firms offering avatars and their animations. Clothing much like today where certain companies make outfits for certain of these brands. World building companies offering pre-made or customized world spaces of varying size and scale, that could have attributes assigned to them (things like gravity/physics, maturity rating, direct links to partner or similar spaces, to sheer size/landscaping etc) depending on their resources. These worlds could be as crowded as clubs and concerts and malls, to just your small little home (or home"s", since maybe your dragon avatar and human male persona don't share the same sort of decorating ideas :)) You'd have everything from large 3D open worlds with the quality of AAA video games, down to small cottages in a hidden glen.

My vision is that all of these things could interact with one another based on a set of open-source rules that, much like the core set of HTML, for example, everyone buys into. So whatever my avatar was could move from space to space seamlessly, much like TPing from one sim to another.

Now how you get a "directory" of all the worlds, not sure. Maybe it's simply web search? Basically, the metaverse is a "you" that you define in the moment exploring whatever worlds in 3D that you want.

But this walled garden idea where I can't move my SL "me" around to other experiences? These aren't metaverses, they are small isolated instances of closed spaces that are not a meta anything.

PS. And as much as I love SL, my goodness, the three-decade designer in me recognizes how stagnant efforts are with it. It's creaking along. Trying to hold onto this antiquated code is going to be the death-knell one day. It's like there are no real innovative ideas and just building additional scaffolding to keep the house from falling down. You're going to have to tear the bandage off at some point and cause some pain, or remain just what we are. A backwater of 50,000 concurrent users when there are existing platforms with 10x that amount.

I'm guessing none of you were ever members of the "Interoperability" group that went on for years and years, with key Lindens and residents in it, and people like me just reporting on the advocacy of crime that always went with it. Years and years. All kinds of companies, the "humming engineers" from IEEE, etc. And it all ended in tears. I think that it doesn't exist any more or is completely quiescent or maybe got killed when Yahoo changed their groups thing. Yes, there were those naive bunnies or starry-eyed cosmic engineers that thought there would be a Metaverse "like" HTML was. Despite this crazy jamming to make "https" which then...did what then, did it? Remember? Funny how that didn't become ubiquitous, eh? You have to be more critical of all this jazz. It's not sacred.

Remember how we couldn't encrypt IP because it could "always be broken" and if you made keys they would "always fall into the wrong hands". Yet we were supposed to sit still for absolute encryption of communications, which made Snowden possible. Funny, that. Crypto for anarchy, not for protecting IP rights. 

There was always a claque advocating "liberation" of all permissions and "freeing" content because that was supposedly such a hobble to interoperability. Then others would explain that it wasn't. Not everything is done by code-as-law; it's good to keep old fashioned organic law applicable because you never really take off to a unicorn realm completely, as long as your human body is still rooted on earth.

There is always this idea in every single Metaverse discussion that there is going to be this use case where people see something they like on another avatar or in an ad or a miniature store, click on it, and then have some way to privately "try it on". And it turns out that this idea just never gets uptake. People like going to the actual stores and trying things on, or did, before COVID. Now they do another thing, order something, then return it if it doesn't fit. So yeah, all these delivery systems are clogged with all this stuff -- but try just doing one thing: get the app to measure your foot so you can order the right sneaker size. It has so many problems! It doesn't work! And that's Nike running it, not LL. No, we are far from prime time with this "try before you buy" stuff.

Techs love the idea of avatars "moving seemlessly from world to world." Like a Shengen visa in Europe (before COVID). Except...what are all these worlds you move between? Most people don't want to endlessly try Steam games and go visit every single Open Simulator and Kitely location. The population even of Mainland explorers is small -- a hearty bunch, but most people stay on their sims, chat, have sex, chat some more, browse, go shopping. They don't travel. The human race migrated out of Africa and got very far away. There are Native Americans whose ancestors crossed from Eurasia into the Americas. But most people don't keep traveling and traveling in real life -- and in simulated life they don't either. You have to look at what real people really do. 

They have Windows! Windows is already the interoperable Metaverse! I can tab down SL and go into The Endless Forest. Or to some gallery that Philip Linden has made somewhere with NFTs. Or if I was that type, into some Steam game. Surely your techy computers are strong enough to have all these apps running at once, and you can toggle them?

Remember when Mr. NoCal, a famous personage from The Sims Online, started a radio station so you could hear songs simultaneously both in the Sims Online, and in Second Life, because the populations then were migrating, and sometimes falling back because SL was too full of griefing and you need such fancy graphic cards. The very first night he did this, I requested a song from Mr. NoCal, Robert Palmer's "Which of Us is the Fool," so it was heard in my SL club and his TSO Club. Whee! Let me tell you that these thrills wear off quickly. Remember of all those "mixed reality" shows with SL and RL art galleries in NYC? I do. Where are they now lol?

Always and everywhere, you have to ask...interoperable FOR WHAT? To do WHAT. If you want to play a Steam game, go do that, and don't lag yourself with SL too. You don't need to walk out of SL right into your steam game. For that you have "Chrome", which is also the first interoperable Metaverse, too!

For nearly 18 years now, I've been hearing about the "spaghetti code" and how you can't change it because it's "like swapping out a plane engine at high altitude". Except...the Lindens change their code and add mesh, animesh, bento, Windlight and other things that break what was good about SL in some ways.

 

Edited November 11, 2021 by Prokofy Neva

[Mr Amore]

8 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:

It's not even that complicated, the most common activity is social interactions, chatter & hanging out.

Everything else is just a route to that.

This is one of the fundamental missteps made by Sansar, they figured the club and the DJ were the point, when really they only exist to provide a back drop for the social aspects. Something Sansar was seriously deficient in.

At any social venue most avatars are standing AFK, silently people watching or in IMs picking up their next ERP. The few clubs I've visited are a constant spam of "Hi xxxxx", "Hello xxxx", "Hey xxxx" then random gestures of "Weeeeeee" and "Wooooooo". And this is why there are fewer clubs than you'd expect from a game with 40k+ concurrent users.

In saying that, SL does have superior social features compared to other games. The one draw keeping residents returning are their SL friends and communities.

Sansar was the right direction to take, it just needed a few more years of development. Its social features were lacking, the focus on VR was off-putting and the restriction on adult content was as good as inscribing its own epitaph.

The question is how you envision a future metaverse and whether today's SL is capable of delivering?

To have the freedom to create worlds we need vastly larger sims. This alone may never happen.

[Coffee Pancake]

29 minutes ago, Mr Amore said:

In saying that, SL does have superior social features compared to other games. The one draw keeping residents returning are their SL friends and communities.

This, as we have seen, is an extremely fragile bond.

It only takes a smaller percentage of people from one community to migrate 'somewhere better' and their entire social circle will up and follow. Once it starts to snowball, there is no stopping it and we're left with empty regions that their owners hold for a while due to a sunk cost. Community hubs hold out longest as a place to meet up back in SL, but the core activities of that community in SL never recovers.

 

29 minutes ago, Mr Amore said:

Sansar was the right direction to take, it just needed a few more years of development. Its social features were lacking, the focus on VR was off-putting and the restriction on adult content was as good as inscribing its own epitaph.

Sansar initial direction was fine (not great, just fine), but the dithering and constant direction changes and lack of time spent developing community systems really doomed it. It's "experiences" we're also static in nature. You could make a really beautiful campfire for people to stand around, but there was literally nothing for them to do once they got there.

The creative / building experience was a disaster and entirely disconnected from the experience of using the platform. 

Most people who tried it made up their minds in a single session and then never returned.

It was also very clearly targeted at other people. 

29 minutes ago, Mr Amore said:

The question is how you envision a future metaverse and whether today's SL is capable of delivering?

The metaverse is a bedrock technology. It's the base used to build everything else.

29 minutes ago, Mr Amore said:

To have the freedom to create worlds we need vastly larger sims. This alone may never happen.

We need a lot more besides, but so long as we're tied to the walled garden, only technologies that can be uniformly applied to entire grid can be implemented.

Every region can only ever have capabilities identical and open to all other regions.

We can't build massive worlds, or worlds with fundamentally different properties & capabilities (such as instancing) in SL as it stands. If LL don't offer something, then we're SOL and have no choice but to go elsewhere.

An open grid would allow the development of regions with capabilities specifically designed around the needs of the experience being created.