Safari on the Socials

The Alps and the New York metropolitan area both have about the same number of residents - 19 million. They both have worldwide fame as tourist destinations, and are full of storied locations - some scary, some beautiful, all memorable in their own way. They say that in New York City, you can hear just about every language on earth. The Alps, on the other hand, have given life to scores of local dialects and languages over the centuries, from Romansch and Piemontese to Walser and Friulian, and of course the mysterious language of the Voynich Manuscript is an alpine tongue.

Thinking  of Opensim and Second Life in those terms goes a long way in illustrating the difference and similarities between the two. 
Opensim is like the Alps, which span eight different countries, from Monaco to Slovenia. The weather, the culture, the laws, the history, even the mountains morph in shape and nature as you travel from the Maritimes to the Dolomites. The people aren't always so easy to spot, down in the valleys or hidden by a range of majestic peaks.

Second Life is like New York - a dense, diverse population, with many different walks of life, but with everyone sharing the city's infrastructure, and general government; there are the same mains, trains, and authorities no matter where you go. 

If you ask a few New Yorkers to name five famous comedians, and what's the weather like today, chances are their answers would be pretty similar. Ask people from the alpine cities of Salzburg and Grenoble the same two questions, and their answers are unlikely to match up.

They're very different places, the multiplicity of grids in Opensim and the monolithic grid, SL ... and don't even get me started on comparing them in terms of the cost of living.

That said, there are many points in common, too, between the urban and the alpine. Lots of people never stray out of their comfort zone and visit different neighborhoods of New York, and there are plenty of communities in the Alps where people cling to their mountain fastness and are distrustful of outsiders. Again, the virtual mirrors RL. Behavior based on 'them and us' is perhaps more marked in Opensim where some inhabitants occasionally develop that unhelpful habit of thinking 'My Grid Über Alles'. But mostly, these days, that kind of nonsense has been abandoned.

Too much tooting your own horn is liable to make you look ridiculous.

Of course, you can feel lost and lonely in the big city, or in SL - just google 'second life lonely' and you'll see this has been a persistent issue over the past 20 years. At least in the Big Apple/SL there are people around, even if you don't know them, whereas the Alps, and Opensim, offer some mountain sized challenges to finding friends. 

Just ask the von Trapps.

For some of us, that's what makes Opensim so exciting - the wide open spaces, the challenge to reach heights and secret valleys of previously unknown grids, the discovery of interesting people, - the prices! - the less stressful lifestyle. But for those coming from Second Life, and imagining that Opensim is just going to be the same-old, same-old,  be advised. This is a different country, a different topography.  You might have to sacrifice some of your comfort zone behavior to thrive here, but like the ban on flip flops in the Cinque Terre, but sometimes a small personal adjustment can open up new vistas to your virtual life.

But I digress.

Opensim is decentralized, and there's more uphill work to do to connect with communities, so what are some good strategies for quickly finding people online, and making friends?

Join a grid with a good sized population. You can find out which grids have the best statistics by checking out Maria Korolov's Hypergrid Business Grid Stats page. 

Choose a grid where people are going to be online when you're online. If your time zone is, say, Central Time USA, and you're only available to be online in the evenings, it doesn't make a lot of sense to join a grid where everyone else is on European time. How can you know that? Ask one of the grid Admins. Unlike the lofty Lindens, most grids in Opensim have a much more democratic structure and grid owners or their assistants will be more than happy to answer questions.

Stay in touch via the Socials. You may hate social media, so do I, but in this case, it can be your friend. 

There are many options, but here are the top three best for Opensim. Each has its pros and cons, but if you can bear to do so, join all three, if you do, you'll find that Opensim is a much busier place than you may have at first thought.

Facebook groups like Hypergrid Happenings, Opensim Virtual and Opensim Community will put you in touch with hundreds of people who regularly work and play in opensim. There's a HG Safari group there too, with info about HG Safari events, nothing else. Here is an example of a HG Safari event, coming up this week.

Pretty much every grid has its own Discord group. It can be a challenge to navigate Discord, they make it more tricky to find groups and individuals than Facebook does, but a good place to start is Mal Burns' mega-server Hypergrid Explorers and Creators. Yes, HG Safari has a server there too, where our events are posted, here's an invitation to join us on Discord. 

Important to note - in both Discord and Facebook I go out of my way to avoid you being spammed by messages and ads that are not related to HG Safari tours and blog posts, so if you want a wider view of opensim, join many other groups and servers, not just HG Safari!

And of course, Opensimworld, which turns 10 this year (congratulations, Satyr!) is hands down the biggest social media platform dedicated to Opensim. 

You can browse the site without joining, and you can join even if you do not have a region or grid of your own; once you have an account, you will be able to friend people, to comment on the posts on the front page, review regions you've visited, and join groups, like the HG Safari group, and Nico Kailani's  'What are You Looking For' group - out and out the bes group on Opensimworld, and a must for anyone who has ever been looking for anything in Opensim! 

The Opensimworld  Events page will show you what's happening in terms of parties, gigs, and classes, and you can look ahead on the calendar to see what's coming up. 

The Regions page will show you which sims have people on them in real time, so you can go over and see what's up. Generally speaking, people don't mind you dropping in, (if they did mind, they wouldn't have put an Opensimworld Beacon on their land) so don't feel you need an invite before popping over.

Whether you consider yourself a loner, or if you're lonely, staying in touch through these external sites will help you get the lie of the land in Opensim, and hopefully will put you on top of the world!