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 one grid, often had little or no idea of the existence of 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 ay 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 a 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.

Safari gets a Fair Shake

       Two destinations this week, and both of them are about connecting and sharing across grids. Two hosts, Satyr Gator and Ozwell Wayfarer, both of them keen builders who have done that extraordinary thing, they have looked up from their own work and beyond their own creativity, and decided to do something for the greater good.

Ozwell Wayfarer and Satyr Gator

          Our first stop was on OSGrid, Satyr Gator's sim opensimworld full HG Addresses at the end, as usual. 
        This is a lovely imaginative build where you can find the famous beacons available - the beacon you'll need to add your grid to the opensimworld.com website which allows people to find your region, club, shop or institution in the massive universe of ... well, open sim worlds, there's really no other way to put it. 

        Get your beacon, but explore the rest of the region too, there are NPCs and spaceships and a lovely psychedelic dance floor. But for our group, there was - let's say, a certain amount of lag.