Gabriele Graves

I've been using Firestorm for way longer than you. There is no Firestorm account. They're all SL accounts. Firestorm just uploads and downloads it's profile pictures through the legacy viewer API same as all other viewers that use the legacy profile API and the same one that LL used to use for the official viewer profiles. LL has been through 2 re-implementations of profiles since the legacy profiles. The first was web profiles and now the new profile API. There have been known issues with LL syncing profiles between the legacy API and the web API. A lot of what you are saying doesn't make any sense. What Firestorm profile picture upload button? Do you mean the Snapshot Share to Profile Feed? That shares a snapshot to your My Second Life Profile Feed and is still there in the latest. No viewer is able to search "local information and pictures". Anything any viewer can access has to be stored with LL on their cloud servers. Anything stored locally on a users hard disk is either a cached copy of something on the servers or things like chat logs and no viewer can access those directly. The real reason why things are probably getting better is that LL's newest profile API doesn't use web profiles at all because they are going away, it uses a similar mechanism to the legacy API but better.

Well I cannot comment on your edge case but that wasn't Firestorm having a special upload, they have always supported the legacy profiles the same as other viewers that did.

Um no. I've been using Firestorm for a very long time and they have always used the legacy profiles that LL created and then dropped in favour of web profiles. Now LL have created new in-viewer profiles again and are dropping web profiles. For a long time throughout the years I could update the Firestorm inworld picture from the My Second Life part of the web site. There have been many times when the sync from My Second Life to the viewer was broken though but that would have affected any viewers using legacy profiles.

I wouldn't want SL's group chat to become like Discord. I tried it when groups were particularly bad, disliked it a lot and subsequently closed my account. Like a lot of social media stuff it's designed to keep grabbing your attention as much as possible. That's not a good design for something that is supposed to be adjacent to your main SL activities.

Indeed they did. I would expect a respected and professional creator to rise above that and give a professional and courteous response nonetheless otherwise it's extremely bad PR they create for themselves.

Yes people have the right to run their businesses however they please even if they decide to engage in shady practices and/or be indifferent or outright hostile to their customers. They shouldn't be surprised though if their reputation and sales plummet as people discuss what they don't like about such businesses. No, it isn't whining for people to discuss what they don't like about the way a business conducts itself. Thank you for revealing how you think of customers in general.

I have zero people on my inworld block list. I used to have zero on the forums too but now I have every repetitive land sales/rental advertiser on there. That's a fault of the forum software though for not letting us block topics. People either generally don't annoy me enough to block or I've learned to ignore them.

Even ignoring that there are ways of copying mesh/prim objects that are undetectable, inspecting a modifiable mesh object will not tell anyone anything about that object that they can use to replicate or "counterfeit" it. Scripts are different and nobody puts in modifiable scripts on a commercial product. However most people just want the object to be modifiable so that they can adjust materials, re-texture, tint, etc. and in these discussions are not expecting scripts to be modifiable as well. If any creator believes that no-mod protects anything, then they are likely to be taken in by all kinds of SL scams too.

LL competing too closely with those they sell the majority of their private islands would not be a smart move. This is because LL will always have the competitive advantage due to the fact they provide the service to everyone and would most likely end up driving many estates from the land market. After all who would stay in a market where the service provider makes it almost impossible to make bank? Why does that matter? LL finds the estate market beneficial obviously or they would put a stop to it. In many ways, collectively, they are like franchise owners, brokers, bulk resellers, etc. and so for some special pricing many different flavours of offerings become available from which they get revenue where otherwise may get nothing. Offerings that LL may not be interested in providing themselves or may find difficult to provide for one reason or another. Others providing this frees up LL to focus more on their core business and pursue other strategies. Just like it isn't a given that all people would go with the lowest cost and some prefer to go direct to LL, conversely there are many who don't want to go direct to LL, would prefer a lower cost product and/or a variety of flavours of themes, rules and approaches to land management. However in between those are many people who would go with the lowest price but if LL targets these then they most likely would lose all those different offering flavours. So short version, LL would be nuts to be competitive with estate pricing in the sense you mean.

Hey, I resemble that remark!

Check out the announcement @TimKoul it doesn't mention perk at all. They are calling it a benefit:

The perk is the ability to take up the offer and actually they do get to call it a perk or whatever the heck they feel like.

You'd have to put in a support ticket to not only ask but to find out what you'd need to do should it be allowed.

Most of the eastern seaboard (I joke, I joke)

Have you wiped the monitor to make sure they really are apostrophes?

Preferably go back in time a hundred years and put in a high earning savings account.

Hmmm, maybe LL could do something. Perhaps they could add being banned as a Basic-level Perk

First person to provide a live update stream of their reputation status will get a

Strangely enough, we had this a few days ago: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/01/new-zealand-authorities-apologise-for-encouraging-parents-to-tax-halloween-sweets

If this is a stepping stone on the way to a la carte then great because really that's the only logical end point in my opinion simply because everyone wants things sliced up differently. If Plus is a way to own land at a lower price point then great too, anything that encourages land ownership is a good thing. However, I can see there being a lot of interest in a level above Basic and below Premium with more group slots, premium-like priority access to events, free asset uploads, lower group/event fees, extra animesh slot but no land tier <= this last part simply because many people don't want land or have estate land.

All types of regions have something about them that makes them unsuitable to be used in some way for some things. Even full private islands have at least one limitation I can think of, they cannot just be joined up to mainland, there has to be special program/requirements for it, so a mainland region trumps a full private island due to being joined up already. So with mainland regions vs homesteads there are just a different set of limits and a bunch of pros-and-cons on each side, I don't see either as "first" or "second" class. It's more selecting the right product that fits your needs. For example: Neither of the limits of land impact (5000 is plenty for my needs) or number of visitors (I am never going to need as many as 25) matter to me that much and so it's great that LL can bring me that at a much reduced price point than they could previously. That's the brilliant thing though, there are already quite of a lot of nuanced options to choose from for SL land and now there is one more.

In addition, with a mainland region you can only choose from what is available, rarely get the whole region (public roads, etc.) and you never get estate rights. There are also limits to terraforming.

I was meaning about the putting the Homestead next to someone else's. Isn't it the same though? Presumably since each avatar can only own one Homestead with P+ then each avatar would be classed as a different person and you would use the same feature on the dashboard?

The option to do this is available from my dashboard the same as for any island.