In Touch, Inworld

If you're old enough to remember the early days of opensim, you will remember how hit and miss communications were. There were scores of grids, and no end of wide open spaces, but not a lot of people, and those that were on one grid, often had little or no idea of the existence of other people in other places.

Being a bit countercultural, often curmudgeonly, and also busy building, that was fine for most people most of the time. But humans are gregarious at heart. How to stay in touch?  IRC, the 80's way of communicating, was favored by many of the geeks behind the opensimulator code and you could wait literally days for someone to answer a question. 

This Map made by Pathfinder Lester back in the day gives you an idea of our horizons among the hg enabled grids.

Between hypergridders, news about events was largely a matter of word of mouth, or  habit - like the regular Friday dance on OSGrid run by Dorothea Lundquist and the late and much missed Jay Maze. Doro is Opensim royalty but very modest about her place in our heritage, this post talks a bit about the couple's contribution to early Opensim hg-socializing at their club Close Encounters.

More was needed. Facebook groups for Opensim began to be a way to stay in touch. Like Maria Korolov's Hypergrid, started in Spring 2009, the same time she launched Hypergrid Business. It wasn't the first Opensim specific group on Facebook - Adam Frisby started Opensimulator in 2007. Lots of groups with a more social skew followed, including Miguel Rotunno's Opensim News in 2011 and John Sheppard's  Hypergrid Happenings in 2015. There are many more, here are two of the biggest:  Opensim Community by Virtlantis and Opensim Virtual founded by the people who brought you Sacrarium grid. Both of these groups have about 1400 members and started four years ago. 

Many spammers put ads in all these groups so it's easy to keep up with the news about upcoming events. Many grids have their own group, where you may find more specific notifications. Much smaller than the general groups, but bigger than the grid-specific ones is the HG Safari group, founded in 2014 with only about 500 members, and zero outside spam.

For hundreds of Opensimmers who used this platform, one of the biggest problems back in the naughties was that FB deleted many accounts belonging to avatars, because of their 'no fake names' policy.  That's why many used Google plus. This is the G+ group for HG Safari back in the day, captured and archived by the lovely Safari Regular, Lite House. Good times!

G+ died in 2019, just one among many social media platforms that never made it, or faded into the background. Fighting the juggernaut of Facebook proved too tough - we all hate it, but many of us use it anyway. 

The Nara's Nook channel on
Hypergrid Explorers and Creators Discord

In 2018 Discord became flavor of the moment, and in February of that year, Mal Burns started a Server meant for anyone in Opensim to use - something not 'tribal'  and not severely geeky, but meant to be hypergrid friendly.  He called it Hypergrid Explorers and Creators and he set up channels for all the grids, where people could post their news or events. There are also channels for artists, tech heads, and machinima makers to advertise their work, and much more. 

Mal's idea was that you could have a centralized point in Discord where people spammed each event just the once and everyone could see it. But this being opensim, it didn't really work like that. The past couple of years have seen a boom in Opensim's  presence on Discord. There are hundreds of servers/channels, each a mix of unique content and repetitious ads.

For those who don't like FB or Discord because they are yuck, there's also Mastodon. Lots of ways to connect with virtual world people there, but the expert in the field is Jupiter Rowland not me, so IM him inworld and get him to explain about it, and if you want, watch this interview... 

And then, there is Opensimworld. Before getting into that though, a shoutout to GridTalk, an old school forum in German which predates almost everything mentioned here. Its spiritual home is on Dorena's World and it was set up originally by Bogus Curry -  here is an English interview with him. 

But back to OSW. 

Satyr set it up a little over 12 years ago. If you're old enough to remember those early days, the joy of being able to see where people were in real time, in the vast galaxy of mostly empty regions in Opensim - well it was spectacular, and in many ways it made Opensim the vibrant place it is today. 

Satyr Gator

But..... from just about day one, a section of the opensim community began  trolling and bitching on OSW. Occasionally funny, mostly disgusting. The introduction of Gold Coins, an attempt to make people pay to be boring, petty, and longwinded on the front page, didn't fix it, or teach anyone to edit their 2 pages of thoughts into a concise three line comment. 

 I love Satyr and his immense contribution to Opensim. I don't love all the ads on OSW, but I'll live with them. My strategy has been to bookmark Regions page, because it is a wonderful window on what is happening across opensim. There are thousands of regions registered with OSW, many relatively unknown, many offline, but that might spring back into life at any time. Also handy for sims that have moved from one grid to another - without this directory you might never find them again. 

Over the years lots of Annie Oakleys have come along with alternatives to Opensimworld. It's easy to see why. They are embarrassed and frustrated by the way otherwise normal people suddenly go postal, and by the small but vociferous group of trolls who make Opensim look bad on a regular basis.

I can't possibly remember all the contenders, but they include HypeMetaverse by Druskus of ZoneNations grid, and  OSSN by Vlad Helsing of Bloodmoonpack grid, and Dark Wolf's opensimwelt. It's fair to say that none of these have taken Opensim by storm, and Hype is now offline as far as I can tell, though Druskus' grid is still  fighting fit.

Enter a new contender, GridGather. It's built by the Neverworld team. Like OSW, you have an account where you can do publicity for your sims, no matter which grid they are on. 

The site started out as more of a simple directory of opensim, but it has since developed into something more social. 

You can post on the front page, Friend other users and message them, Like and comment on other people's regions and posts. You can share the job of posting about your venue by inviting a collaborator to work with you, a bit like shared admin of a region or an Inworld Group. There are special devices similar to the OSW beacon, so people can see if your region is online, and how many are there. Caution though, on Gridgather the equivalent of a beacon is called a Portal and a 'Beacon' is a sort of notification bell on the website, so don't get confused. 

Another social feature that's nice... if you want, you can put up the special Display or Ad board on your land that shows upcoming events - you can pick which ones the Ad board will display, so friends can cross-promote their events. 

The cost? If you have a Neverworld account, or simply want the basic services, there is no fee. For those who want to make heavier use of the site but aren't Neverworld 'natives', the charges are not huge - this page shows the fees.  And there are no ads, for anyone! which is going to make it very appealing to a lot of people. Why not check it out!