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  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.

Linda Kellie's FreeLife

This is Linda Kellie, previously known as Ayla Holt in SL and Inworldz, where she spent over 5 years making stuff - clothes, furniture, skins, buildings, sculpties, and more. She's gradually putting all her goodies on her website, to be exported, modified, re-used any way you want, as she explains in her personal note. 
It's an extraordinary move, and so far there's over 250MB of material available, all set out in nicely categorized sections. 
Yes, that's right - FREE, FULL PERM/MOD/TRANS.
 On your computer. Good for any grid.
Linda Kellie: Not all of my stuff is on my webpage yet, a lot's here on OSGrid, and I am still adding to it, I haven't been here long! Making things has made virtual worlds more fun for me. I loved both SL and InWorldz, I just worked really hard in SL, and then played hard in IW. I quit for awhile, and decided I needed to do something with all my inventory, backed up on my hard drive. A friend told me about the OpenSimCreations.com site - it was amazing to me that someone would give away files for export to any grid. I didn't know I could even back up to xml. I think you just have to get to a point where you don't care about people stealing your ideas and stuff. I love having my stuff with no rules and giving people the freedom they need. I hope Vanish doesn't think I stole his idea. I kinda did, I guess! But it just made sense to put it on a website that I wasn't using anyway, and he has made a few positive comments.

What could be better? If you like to make stuff, but