James Seraph

I'm confused as to the value of mainland. In the beginning when SL was very new, the feel of a 'real place' with highways, landscape etc. was intriguing and helped people connect. The Telehubs insured that you had to spend a lot of time going to places and went by others. But that was wildly impractical. Nobody wants to take a 5 minute crashy flight when they login just to see what other people created. This is the web, and we find things we are interested in by searching for them. The Lindens have put in a lot of features that do advertisements for "best of" content and I've occasionally visited those. If your content isn't "best of" then it might be of particular interest to me, and I might go there from search. If it isn't best of or of interest to me, I don't want to ever visit it. Private regions are the present. The Mainland concept is the past. The issue may be more how to deal with the deflation of people who held something that once had some value and now doesn't. Mainland is just a bunch of odd shaped rentable parcels close together. If people want to build a community they rent sims and *build a community* not a random agglomeration of shops, ads, and houses. SL is more suitable for large and small private sims than for the bizzarre melting pot of mainland. I find it impossible to care about it or miss it. I think the real edge of SL is the fantastically detailed close knit communities that have grown up in private areas. Caledon would be a good example. These Sims maintain thematic coherence in a way that mainland can't. I can't think of why anyone would be interested in mainland, but it certainly isn't my duty to do anything about something that is ultimately just obsolete.