When disabled Fediverse users demand participation in accessibility discussions, but there are no discussions in the first place, and they themselves don't even seem to be available to give accessibility feedback

"Nothing about us without us" is the catchphrase used by disabled accessibility activists who are trying to get everyone to get accessibility right. It means that non-disabled people should stop assuming what disabled people need. Instead, they should listen to what disabled people say they need and then give them what they need.

Just like accessibility in the digital realm in general, this is not only targetted at professional Web or UI developers. This is targetted at any and all social media users just as well.

However, this would be a great deal easier if it wasn't still "without them" all the time.

Lack of necessary feedback

Alt-text and image descriptions are one example and one major issue. How are we, the sighted Fediverse users, supposed to know what blind or visually-impaired users really need and where they need it if we never get any feedback? And we never get any feedback, especially not from blind or visually-impaired users.

Granted, only sighted users can call us out for an AI-generated alt-text that's complete rubbish because non-sighted users can't compare the alt-text with the image.

But non-sighted users could tell us whether they're sufficiently informed or not. They could tell us whether they're satisfied with an image description mentioning that something is there, or whether they need to be told what this something looks like. They could tell us which information in an image description is useful to them, which isn't, and what they'd suggest to improve its usefulness.

They could tell us whether certain information that's in the alt-text right now should better go elsewhere, like into the post. They could tell us whether extra information needed to understand a post or an image should be given right in the post that contains the image or through an external link. They could tell us whether they need more explanation on a certain topic displayed in an image, or whether there is too much explanation that they don't need. (Of course, they should take into consideration that some of us do not have a 500-character limit.)

Instead, we, the sighted users who are expected to describe our images, receive no feedback for our image descriptions at all. We're expected to know exactly what blind or visually-impaired users need, and we're expected to know it right off the bat without being told so by blind or visually-impaired users. It should be crystal-clear how this is impossible.

What are we supposed to do instead? Send all our image posts directly to one or two dozen people who we know are blind and ask for feedback? I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who considers this very bad style, especially in the long run, not to mention no guarantee for feedback.

So with no feedback, all we can do is guess what blind or visually-impaired users need.

Common alt-text guides are not helpful

Now you might wonder why all this is supposed to be such a big problem. After all, there are so many alt-text guides out there on the Web that tell us how to do it.

Yes, but here in the Fediverse, they're all half-useless.

The vast majority of them is written for static Web sites, either scientific or technological or commercial. Some include blogs, again, either scientific or technological or commercial. The moment they start relying on captions and HTML code, you know you can toss them because they don't translate to almost anything in the Fediverse.

What few alt-text guides are written for social media are written for the huge corporate American silos. ?, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn. They do not translate to the Fediverse which has its own rules and cultures, not to mention much higher character limits, if any.

Yes, there are one or two guides on how to write alt-text in the Fediverse. But they're always about Mastodon, only Mastodon and nothing but Mastodon. They're written for Mastodon's limitations, especially only 500 characters being available in the post itself versus a whopping 1,500 characters being available in the alt-text. And they're written with Mastodon's culture in mind which, in turn, is influenced by Mastodon's limitations.

Elsewhere in the Fediverse than Mastodon, you have much more possibilities. You have thousands of characters to use up in your post. Or you don't have any character limit to worry about at all. You don't have all means at hand that you have on a static HTML Web site. Even the few dozen (streams) users who can use HTML in social media posts don't have the same influence on the layout of their posts as Web designers have on Web sites. Still, you aren't bound to Mastodon's self-imposed limitations.

And yet, those Mastodon alt-text guides tell you you have to squeeze all information into the alt-text as if you don't have any room in the post. Which, unlike most Mastodon users, you do have.

It certainly doesn't help that the Fediverse's entire accessibility culture comes from Mastodon, concentrates on Mastodon and only takes Mastodon into consideration with all its limitations. Apparently, if you describe an image for the blind and the visually-impaired, you must describe everything in the alt-text. After all, according to the keepers of accessibility in the Fediverse, how could you possibly describe anything in a post with a 500-character limit?

In addition, all guides always only cover their specific standard cases. For example, an image description guide for static scientific Web sites only covers images that are typical for static scientific Web sites. Graphs, flowcharts, maybe a portrait picture. Everything else is an edge-case that is not covered by the guide.

There are even pictures that are edge-cases for all guides and not sufficiently or not at all covered by any of them. When I post an image, it's practically always such an edge-case, and I can only guess what might be the right way to describe it.

Discussing Fediverse accessibility is necessary...

Even single feedback for image descriptions, media descriptions, transcripts etc. is not that useful. If one user gives you feedback, you know what this one user needs. But you do not know what the general public with disabilities needs. And what actually matters is just that. Another user might give you wholly different feedback. Two different blind users are likely to give you two different feedbacks on the same image description.

What is needed so direly is open discussion about accessibility in the Fediverse. People gathering together, talking about accessibility, exchanging experiences, exchanging ideas, exchanging knowledge that others don't have. People with various disabilities and special requirements in the Fediverse need to join this discussion because "nothing about them without them", right? After all, it is about them.

And people from outside of Mastodon need to join, too. They are needed to give insights on what can be done on Pleroma and Akkoma, on Misskey, Firefish, Iceshrimp, Sharkey and Catodon, on Friendica, Hubzilla and (streams), on Lemmy, Mbin, PieFed and Sublinks and everywhere else. They are needed to combat the rampant Mastodon-centricism and keep reminding the Mastodon users that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon. They are needed to explain that the Fediverse outside of Mastodon offers many more possibilities than Mastodon that can be used for accessibility. They are needed for solutions to be found that are not bound to Mastodon's restrictions. And they need to learn about there being accessibility in the Fediverse in the first place because it's currently pretty much a topic that only exists on Mastodon.

There are so many things I'd personally like to be discussed and ideally brought to a consensus of sorts. For example:

• Explaining things in the alt-text versus explaining things in the post versus linking to external sites for explanations.
  The first is the established Mastodon standard, but any information exclusively available in the alt-text is inaccessible to people who can't access alt-text, including due to physical disabilities.
  The second is the most accessible, but it inflates the post, and it breaks with several Mastodon principles (probably over 500 characters, explanation not in the alt-text).
  The third is the easiest way, but it's inconvenient because image and explanation are in different places.
• What if an image needs a very long and very detailed visual description, considering the nature of the image and the expected audience?
  Describe the image only in the post (inflates the post, no image description in the alt-text, breaks with Mastodon principles, impossible on vanilla Mastodon)?
  Describe it externally and link to the description (no image description anywhere near the image, image description separated from the image, breaks with Mastodon principles, requires an external space to upload the description)?
  Only give a description that's short enough for the alt-text regardless (insufficient description)?
  Refrain from posting the image altogether?
• Seeing as all text in an image must always be transcribed verbatim, what if text is unreadable for some reason, but whoever posts the image can source the text and transcribe it regardless?
  Must it be transcribed because that's what the rule says?
  Must it be transcribed so that even sighted people know what's written there?
  Must it not be transcribed?

...but it's nigh-impossible

Alas, this won't happen. Ever. It won't happen because there is no place in the Fediverse where it could sensibly happen.

Now you might wonder what gives me that idea. Can't this just be done on Mastodon?

No, it can't. Yes, most participants would be on Mastodon. And Mastodon users who don't know anything else keep saying that Mastodon is sooo good for discussions.

But seriously, if you've experienced anything in the Fediverse that isn't purist microblogging like Mastodon, you've long since have come to the realisation that when it comes to discussions with a certain number of participants, Mastodon is utter rubbish. It has no concept of conversations whatsoever. It's great as a soapbox. But it's outright horrible at holding a discussion together. How are you supposed to have a meaningful discussion with 30 people if you burn through most of your 500-character limit mentioning the other 29?

Also, Mastodon has another disadvantage: Almost all participants will be on Mastodon themselves. Most of them will not know anything about the Fediverse outside Mastodon. At least some will not even know that the Fediverse is more than just Mastodon. And that one poor sap from Friendica will constantly try to remind people that the Fediverse is not only Mastodon, but he'll be ignored because he doesn't always mention all participants in this thread. Because mentioning everyone is not necessary on Friendica itself, so he isn't used to it, but on Mastodon, it's pretty much essential.

Speaking of Friendica, it'd actually be the ideal place in the Fediverse for such discussions because users from almost all over the place could participate. Interaction between Mastodon users and Friendica forums is proven to work very well. A Friendica forum can be moderated, unlike a Guppe group. And posts and comments reach all members of a Friendica forum without mass-mentioning.

The difficulty here would be to get it going in the first place. Ideally, the forum would be set up and run by an experienced Friendica user. But accessibility is not nearly as much an issue on Friendica as it is on Mastodon, so the difficult part would be to find someone who sees the point in running a forum about it in the first place. A Mastodon user who does see the point, on the other hand, would have to get used to something that is a whole lot different from Mastodon while being a forum admin/mod.

Lastly, there is the Threadiverse, Lemmy first and foremost. But Lemmy has its own issues. For starters, it's federated with the Fediverse outside the Threadiverse only barely and not quite reliably, and the devs don't seem to be interested in non-Threadiverse federation. So everyone interested in the topic would need a Lemmy account, and many refuse to make a second Fediverse account for whichever purpose.

If it's on Lemmy, it will naturally attract Lemmy natives. But the vast majority of these have come from Reddit straight to Lemmy. Just like most Mastodon users know next to nothing about the Fediverse outside Mastodon, most Lemmy users know next to nothing about the Fediverse outside Lemmy. I am on Lemmy, and I've actually run into that wall. After all, they barely interact with the Fediverse outside Lemmy. As accessibility isn't an issue on Lemmy either, they know nothing about accessibility on top of knowing nothing about most of the Fediverse.

So instead of having meaningful discussions, you'll spend most of the time educating Lemmy users about the Fediverse outside Lemmy, about Mastodon culture, about accessibility and about why all this should even matter to people who aren't professional Web devs. And yes, you'll have to do it again and again for each newcomer who couldn't be bothered to read up on any of this in older threads.

In fact, I'm not even sure if any of the Threadiverse projects are accessible to blind or visually-impaired users in the first place.

Lastly, I've got some doubts that discussing accessibility in the Fediverse would even possible if there was a perfectly appropriate place for it. I mean, this Fediverse neither gives advice on accessibility within itself beyond linking to always the same useless guides, nor does it give feedback on accessibility measures such as image descriptions.

People, disabled or not, seem to want perfect accessibility. But nobody wants to help others improve their contributions to accessibility in any way. It's easier and more convenient to expect things to happen by themselves.

Whenever I describe a picture from a virtual world, the description grows far beyond everyone's wildest imaginations in size; here's why

I rarely post pictures from virtual worlds anymore. I'd really like to show them to Fediverse users, including those who know nothing about them. But I rarely do that anymore. Not in posts, not even in Hubzilla articles.

That's because pictures posted in the Fediverse need image descriptions. Useful and sufficiently informative image descriptions. And to my understanding, even Hubzilla articles are part of the Fediverse because they're part of Hubzilla. So the exact same rules apply to them that apply to posts. Including image descriptions being an absolute requirement.

And a useful and sufficiently informative image description for a picture from a virtual world has to be absolutely massive. In fact, it can't be done within Mastodon's limits. Not even the 1,500 characters offered for alt-text are enough. Not nearly.

Over the last 12 or 13 months, I've developed my image-describing style, and it's still evolving. However, this also means my image descriptions get more and more detailed with more and more explanations, and so they tend to grow longer and longer.

My first attempt at writing a detailed, informative description for a picture from a virtual world was in November, 2022. It started at over 11,000 characters already and grew beyond 13,000 characters a bit later when I re-worked it and added a missing text transcript. Most recently, I've broken the 40,000-character barrier, also because I've raised my standards to describing pictures within pictures within a picture. I've taken over 13 hours to describe one single picture twice already.

I rarely get any feedback for my image descriptions. But I sometimes have to justify their length, especially to sighted Fediverse users who don't care for virtual worlds.

Sure, most people who come across my pictures don't care for virtual worlds at all. But most people who come across my pictures are fully sighted and don't require any image descriptions. It's still good manners to provide them.

And there may pretty well be people who are very excited about and interested in virtual worlds, especially if it's clear that these are actually existing, living, breathing virtual worlds and not some cryptobro's imagination. And they may want to know everything about these worlds. But they know nothing. They look at the pictures, but they can't figure out from looking at the pictures what these pictures show. Nothing that's in these pictures is really familiar to them.

So when describing a picture from a virtual world, one must never assume that anything in the picture is familiar to the on-looker. In most cases, it is not.

Also, one might say that only sighted people are interested in virtual worlds because virtual worlds are a very visual medium and next to impossible to navigate without eyesight. Still, blind or visually-impaired people may be just as fascinated by virtual worlds as sighted people. And they may be at least just as curious which means they may require even more description and explanation. They want to know what everything looks like, but since they can't see it for themselves, they have to be told.

All this is why pictures from virtual worlds require substantially more detailed and thus much, much longer descriptions than real-life photographs.

The medium

The wordiness of descriptions for images from virtual worlds starts with the medium. It's generally said that image descriptions must not start with "Picture of" or "Image of". Some even say that mentioning the medium, i.e. "Photograph of", is too much.

Unless it is not a digital photograph. And no, it isn't always a digital photograph.

It can just as well be a digitised analogue photograph, film grain and all. It can be a painting. It can be a sketch. It can be a graph. It can be a screenshot of a social media post. It can be a scanned newspaper page.

Or it can be a digital rendering.

Technically speaking, virtual world images are digital renderings. But just writing "digital rendering" isn't enough.

If I only wrote "digital rendering", people would think of spectacular, state-of-the-art, high-resolution digital art with ray-tracing and everything. Like stills from Cyberpunk 2077 for which the graphics settings were temporarily cranked up to levels at which the game becomes unplayable, just to show off. Or like promotional pictures from a Pixar film. Or like the stuff we did in PoV-Ray back in the day. When the single-core CPU ran on full blast for half an hour, but the outcome was a gorgeous screen-sized 3-D picture.

But images from the virtual worlds I frequent are nothing like this. Ray-tracing isn't even an option. It's unavailable. It's technologically impossible. So there is no fancy ray-tracing with fully reflective surfaces and whatnot. But there are shaders with stuff like ambient occlusion.

So where other people may or may not write "photograph", I have to write something like "digital 3-D rendering created using shaders, but without ray-tracing".

The location

If you think that was wordy, think again. Mentioning the location is much worse. And mentioning the location is mandatory in this case.

I mean, it's considered good style to always write where a picture was taken unless, maybe, it was at someone's home, or the location of something is classified.

In real life, that's easy. And except for digital art, digitally generated graphs and pictures of text, almost all pictures in the Fediverse were taken in real-life.

In real life, you can often get away with name-dropping. Most people know at least roughly what "Times Square" refers to. Or "Piccadilly Circus". Or "Monument Valley". Or "Stonehenge". There is no need to break down where these places are. It can be considered common knowledge.

In fact, you get away even more easily with name-dropping landmarks without telling where they are. White House. Empire State Building. Tower Bridge. Golden Gate Bridge. Mount Fuji. Eiffel Tower. Taj Mahal. Sydney Opera House which, admittedly, name-drops its rough location, just like the Hollywood Marquee. All these are names that should ring a bell.

But you can't do that in virtual worlds. In no virtual world can you do that. Not even in Roblox which has twice as many users as Germany has citizens. Much less in worlds running on OpenSim, all of which combined are estimated to have fewer than 50,000 unique monthly users. Whatever "unique" means, considering that many users have more than one avatar in more than one of these worlds.

Such tiny user numbers mean that there are even more people who don't use these worlds, who therefore are completely unfamiliar with these worlds. Who, in fact, don't even know these worlds exist. I'm pretty sure there isn't a single paid Metaverse expert of any kind who has ever even heard of OpenSimulator. They know Horizons, they know The Sandbox, they know Decentraland, they know Rec Room, they know VRchat, they know Roblox and so forth, they may even be aware that Second Life is still around, but they've never in their lives heard of OpenSim. It's that obscure.

So imagine I just name-dropped...

[...] the Sendalonde Community Library.

What'd that tell you?

It'd tell you nothing. You wouldn't know what that is. I couldn't blame you. Right off the bat, I know only two other Fediverse users who definitely know that building because I was there with them. Maybe a few more have been there before. Definitely much fewer than 50. Likely fewer than 20. Out of millions.

Okay, let's add where it is.

[...] the Sendalonde Community Library in Sendalonde.

Does that help?

No, it doesn't. If you don't know the Sendalonde Community Library, you don't know what and where Sendalonde is either. That place is only known for its spectacular library building.

And you've probably never heard of a real-life place with that name. Of course you haven't. That place isn't in real life.

So I'd have to add some more information.

[...] the Sendalonde Community Library in Sendalonde in the Discovery Grid.

What's the Discovery Grid? And what's a grid in this context, and why is it called a grid?

Well, then I have to get even wordier.

[...] the Sendalonde Community Library in Sendalonde in the Discovery Grid which is a 3-D virtual world based on OpenSimulator.

Nobody, absolutely nobody writes that much about a real-life location. Ever.

And still, while you know that I'm talking about a place in a virtual world and what that virtual world is based on, while this question is answered, it raises a new question: What is OpenSimulator?

I wouldn't blame you for asking that. Again, even Metaverse experts don't know OpenSimulator. I'm pretty sure that nobody in the Open Metaverse Interoperability Group, in the Open Metaverse Alliance and at the Open Metaverse Foundation has ever heard of OpenSim. The owners and operators of most existing virtual worlds have never heard of OpenSim except those of Second Life, Overte and maybe a few others. Most Second Life users, present and past, have never heard of OpenSim. Most users of most other virtual worlds, present and past, have never heard of OpenSim.

And billions of people out there believe that Zuckerberg has invented "The Metaverse", and that his virtual worlds are actually branded "Metaverse® ("Metaverse" is a registered trademark of Meta Platforms, Inc. All rights reserved.)" Hardly anyone knows that the term "metaverse" was coined by Neal Stephenson in his cyberpunk novel Snow Crash which, by the way, has inspired Philip Rosedale to create Second Life. And nobody knows that the term "metaverse" has been part of the regular OpenSim users' vocabulary since before 2010. Because nobody knows OpenSim.

And that's why I can't just name-drop "OpenSimulator" either. I have to explain even that.

[...] the Sendalonde Community Library in Sendalonde in the Discovery Grid which is a 3-D virtual world based on OpenSimulator.

OpenSimulator (official website and wiki), OpenSim in short, is a free and open-source platform for 3-D virtual worlds that uses largely the same technology as the commercial virtual world Second Life.

That alone would be more than your typical cat picture alt-text.

But it'd create misconceptions, namely of OpenSim being another walled-garden, headset-only VR platform that has jumped upon the "Metaverse" bandwagon. Because that's what people know about virtual worlds, if anything. So that's what they automatically assume. And that's wrong.

I'd have to keep that from happening by telling people that OpenSim is as decentralised and federated as the Fediverse, only that it even predates Laconi.ca, not to mention Mastodon. Okay, and it only federates with itself and some of its own forks because OpenSim doesn't run on a standardised protocol, and nobody else has ever created anything compatible.

[...] the Sendalonde Community Library in Sendalonde in the Discovery Grid which is a 3-D virtual world based on OpenSimulator.

OpenSimulator (official website and wiki), OpenSim in short, is a free and open-source platform for 3-D virtual worlds that uses largely the same technology as the commercial virtual world Second Life. It was launched as early as 2007, and most of it became a network of federated, interconnected worlds when the Hypergrid was introduced in 2008. It is accessed through client software running on desktop or laptop computers, so-called "viewers". It doesn't require a virtual reality headset, and it actually doesn't support virtual reality headsets.

This is more than most alt-texts on Mastodon. Only this.

But it still leaves one question unanswered: "Discovery Grid? What's that? Why is it called a grid? What's a grid in this context?"

So I'd have to add yet another paragraph.

[...] the Sendalonde Community Library in Sendalonde in the Discovery Grid which is a 3-D virtual world based on OpenSimulator.

OpenSimulator (official website and wiki), OpenSim in short, is a free and open-source platform for 3-D virtual worlds that uses largely the same technology as the commercial virtual world Second Life. It was launched as early as 2007, and most of it a network of federated, interconnected worlds when the Hypergrid was introduced in 2008. It is accessed through client software running on desktop or laptop computers, so-called "viewers". It doesn't require a virtual reality headset, and it actually doesn't support virtual reality headsets.

Just like Second Life's virtual world, worlds based on OpenSim are referred to as "grids" because they are separated into square fields of 256 by 256 metres, so-called "regions". These regions can be empty and inaccessible, or there can be a "simulator" or "sim" running in them. Only these sims count a the actual land area of a grid. It is possible to both look into neighbouring sims and move your avatar across sim borders unless access limitations prevent this.

I'm well past 1,000 characters now. Other people paint entire pictures with words with that many characters. I need them only to explain where a picture was taken. But this should answer all immediate questions and make clear what kind of place the picture shows.

The main downside, apart from the length which for some Mastodon users is too long for a full image description already, is that this will be outdated, should the decision be made to move Sendalonde to another grid again.

And I haven't even started actually describing the image. Blind or visually-impaired users still don't know what it actually shows.

The actual content of the image

If this was a place in real life, I might get away with name-dropping the Sendalonde Community Library and briefly mention that there are some trees around it, and there's a body of water in the background. It'd be absolutely sufficient.

But such a virtual place is something that next to nobody is familiar with. Non-sighted people even less because they're even more unlikely to visit virtual worlds. That's a highly visual medium and usually not really inclusive for non-sighted users.

So if I only name-dropped the Sendalonde Community Library, mentioned where it is located and explained what OpenSim is, I wouldn't be done. There would be blind or visually-impaired people inquiring, "Okay, but what does it look like?" Ditto people with poor internet for whom the image doesn't load.

Sure they would. Because they honestly wouldn't know what it looks like. Because even the sighted users with poor internet have never seen it before. But they would want to know.

So I'd have to tell them. Not doing so would be openly ableist.

And no, one sentence isn't enough. This is a very large, highly complex, highly detailed building and not just a box with a doorway and a sign on it. Besides, remember that we're talking about a virtual world. Architecture in virtual worlds is not bound to the same limits and laws and standards and codes as in real life. Just about everything is possible. So absolutely nothing can ever be considered "a given" and therefore unnecessary to be mentioned.

Now, don't believe that blind or visually-impaired people will limit their "What does it look like?" to the centre-piece of the picture. If you mention something being there, they want to know what it looks like. Always. Regardless of whether or not they used to be sighted, they still don't know what whatever you've mentioned looks like specifically in a virtual world. And, again, it's likely that they don't know what it looks like at all.

Thus, if I mention it, I have to describe it. Always. All of it.

There are exactly two exceptions. One, if something is fully outside the borders of the image. Two, if something is fully covered up by something else. And I'm not even entirely sure about the latter case.

Sometimes, a visual description isn't even enough. Sometimes, I can mention that something is somewhere in the picture. I can describe what that something looks like in all details. But people still don't know what it is.

I can mention that there's an OpenSimWorld beacon standing somewhere. I can describe its looks with over a 1,000 words and so much accuracy that an artist could make a fairly accurate drawing of it just from my description.

But people, the artist included, still would not know what an OpenSimWorld beacon is in the first place, nor what it's there for.

So I have to explain what an OpenSimWorld beacon is and what it does.

Before I can do that, I first have to explain what OpenSimWorld is. And that won't be possible with a short one-liner. OpenSimWorld is a very multi-purpose website. Explaining it will require a four-digit number of characters.

Only after I'm done explaining OpenSimWorld, I can start explaining the beacon. And the beacon is quite multi-functional itself. On top of that, I'll have to explain the concept of teleporting around in OpenSim, especially from grid to grid through the Hypergrid.

This is why I generally avoid having OSW beacons in my pictures.

Teleporters themselves aren't quite as bad, but they, too, require lots and lots of words. They have to be described. If there's a picture on them, maybe one that shows a preview of the chosen destination, that picture has to be described. All of a sudden, I have an entire second image to write a description for. And then I have to explain what that teleporter is, what it does, how it works, how it's operated. They don't know teleporters because there are no teleporters in real life.

At least I might not have to explain to them which destinations the teleporter can send an avatar to. The people who need all these descriptions and explanations won't have any use for this particular information because they don't even know the destinations in the first place. And describing and explaining each of these destinations, especially if they're over a hundred, might actually be beyond the scope of an image description, especially since these destinations usually aren't shown in the image itself.

Avatars

Just like in-world objects, avatars and everything more or less similar require detailed, extensive descriptions and explanations. People need to understand how avatars work in this kind of world, and of course, blind or visually-impaired people want to know what these avatars look like. Each and every last one of them. Again, how are they supposed to know otherwise?

I'm not quite sure whether or not it's smart to always give the names of all avatars in the image. It's easy to find them out, but when writing a description especially for a party picture with dozens of avatars in it, associating the depictions of avatars in the image with identities has to be done right away before even only one of these avatars leaves the location.

One thing that needs to be explained right afterwards is how avatars are built. In the cases of Second Life and OpenSim, this means explaining that they usually aren't "monobloc" avatars that can't be modified in-world. Instead, they are modular, put together from lots of elements, usually starting with a mesh body that "replaces" the default system body normally rendered by the viewer, continuing with a skin texture, an eye texture and a shape with over 80 different parameters and ending with clothes and accessories. Of course, this requires an explanation on what "mesh" is, why it's special and when and why it was introduced.

OpenSim also supports script-controlled NPCs which require their own explanation, including that NPCs don't exist in Second Life, and how they work in OpenSim. Animesh exists both in Second Life and OpenSim and requires its own explanation again.

After these explanations, the actual visual description can begin. And it can and has to be every bit as extensive and detailed as for everything else in the picture.

The sex of an avatar does not have to be avoided in the description, at least not in Second Life and OpenSim. There, you basically only have two choices: masculine men and feminine women. Deviating from that is extremely difficult, so next to nobody does that. What few people actually declare their avatars trans describe them as such in the profile. The only other exception are "women with a little extra". All other avatars can safely be assumed to be cis, and their visual sex can be used to describe them.

In virtual worlds, especially Second Life and OpenSim, there is no reason not to mention the skin tone either. A skin is just that: a skin. It can be replaced with just about any other skin on any avatar without changing anything else. It doesn't even have to be natural. It can be snow white, or it can be green, or it can be the grey of bare metal. In fact, in order to satisfy those who are really curious about virtual worlds, it's even necessary to mention if a skin is photo-realistic and has highlights and shades baked on.

Following that comes a description of what the avatar wears, including the hairstyle. This, too, should go into detail and mention things that are so common in real life that nobody would waste a thought about them, such as whether there are creases or crinkles on a piece of clothing at all, and if so, if they're actually part of the 3-D model or only painted on.

Needless to say that non-standard avatars, e.g. dragons, require the same amount of detail when describing them.

Now, only describing what an avatar looks like isn't enough. It's also necessary to describe what the avatar does which means a detailed description of its posture and mimics. Just about all human avatars in Second Life and OpenSim have support for mimics, even though they usually wear a neutral, non-descript expression. But even that needs to be mentioned.

Text transcripts

They say that if there's text somewhere in a picture, it has to be transcribed verbatim in the image description. However, there is no definite rule for text that is too small to be readable, partially obscured by something in front of it or only partially within the borders of the image.

Text not only appears in screenshots of social media posts, photographs of news articles and the like. It may appear in all kinds of photographs, and it may just as well appear in digital renderings from 3-D virtual worlds. It can be on posters, it can be on billboards, it can be on big and small signs, it can be on store marquees, it can be printed on people's clothes, it can be anywhere.

Again, the basic rule is: If there's text, it has to be transcribed.

Now you might say that transcribing illegible text is completely out of question. It can't be read anyway, so it can't be transcribed either. Case closed.

Not so fast. It's true that this text can't be read in the picture. But that one picture is not necessarily the only source for the text in question. If the picture is a real-life photograph, the last resort would be to go back to where the picture was taken, look around more closely and transcribe the bits of text from there.

Granted, that's difficult if whatever a text was on is no longer there, e.g. if it was printed on a T-shirt. And yes, that's extra effort, too much of an effort if you're at home posting pictures which you've taken during your overseas vacation. Flying back there just to transcribe text is completely out of question.

This is a non-issue for pictures from virtual worlds. In most cases, you can always go back to where you've taken a picture, take closer looks at signs and posters and so on, look behind trees or columns or whatever is standing in front of a sign and partly covering it and easily transcribe everything. Or you take the picture and write the description without even leaving first. You can stay there until you're done describing and transcribing everything.

At least Second Life and OpenSim also allow you to move your camera and therefore your vision independently from your avatar. That really makes it possible to take very close looks at just about everything, regardless of whether or not you can get close enough with your avatar.

There are only four cases in which in-world text does not have to be fully transcribed. One, it's incomplete in-world; in this case, transcribe what is there. Two, it's illegible in-world, for example due to a too low texture resolution or texture quality; that's bad luck. Three, it is fully obscured, either because it is fully covered by something else, or because it's on a surface completely facing away from the camera. And four, it isn't even within the borders of the image.

In all other cases, there is no reason not to transcribe text. The text being illegible in the picture isn't. In fact, that's rather a reason to transcribe it: Even sighted people need help figuring out what's written there. And people who are super-curious about virtual worlds and want to know everything about them will not stop at text.

But why?

Yeah, that's all tough, I know. And I can understand if you as the audience are trying to weasel yourself out of having to read such a massive image description. You're trying to get me to not write that much. You're trying to find a situation in which writing so much is not justified, not necessary. Or better yet, enough situations that they become the majority, that a full description ends up only necessary in extremely niche edge cases that you hope to never come across. You want to see that picture, but you want to see it without thousands or tens of thousands of worlds of description.

Let me tell you something: There is no such situation. There is no context in which such a huge image description wouldn't be necessary.

The picture could be part of a post of someone who has visited that place and wants to tell everyone about it. Even if the post itself has only got 200 characters.

The picture could be part of an announcement of an event that's planned to take place there.

The picture could be part of a post from that very event. Or about the event after it has happened.

The picture could be part of an interview with the owners.

The picture could be part of a post about famous locations in OpenSim.

The picture could be part of a post about the Discovery Grid.

The picture could be part of a post about OpenSim in general.

The picture could be part of a post or thread about 6 obscure virtual worlds that you've probably never heard of, and number 4 is really awesome.

The picture could be part of a post about virtual architecture.

The picture could be part of a post about the concept of virtual libraries or bookstores.

The picture could be part of a recommendation of cool OpenSim places to visit.

It doesn't matter. All these cases require the full image description with all its details. And so do all those which I haven't mentioned. There will always be someone coming across the post with the picture who needs the description.

See, I've learned something about the Fediverse. You can try to limit your target audience. But you can't limit your actual audience.

It'd be much easier for me if I could only post to people who know OpenSim and actually lock everyone else out. But I can't.

On the World-Wide Web, it's easy. If you write something niche, pretty much only people interested in that niche will see your content because only they will even look for content like yours. Content has to be actively dug out, but in doing so, you can pick what kind of content to dig out.

In the Fediverse, anyone will come across stuff that they know nothing about, whether they're interested in it or not. Even elaborate filtering of the personal timeline isn't fail-safe. And then there are local and federated timelines on which all kinds of stuff appear.

No matter how hard you try to only post to a specific audience, it is very likely that someone who knows nothing about your topic will see your post on the federated timeline on mastodon.social. It's rude to keep clueless casuals from following you, even though all they do is follow absolutely everyone because they need that background noise of uninteresting stuff on their personal timeline that they have on X due to The Algorithm. And it's impossible to keep people from boosting your posts to clueless casuals, whether these people are your own connections and familiar with your topic, or they've discovered your most recent post on their federated timeline.

You can't keep clueless casuals who need an extensive image description to understand your picture from coming across it. Neither can you keep blind or visually-impaired users who need an image description to even experience the picture in the first place from coming across it.

Neither, by the way, can you keep those who demand everyone always give a sufficient description for any image from coming across yours. And I'm pretty sure that some of them not only demand that from those whom they follow, but from those whose picture posts they come across on the local or federated timelines as well.

Sure, you can ignore them. You can block them. You can flip them the imaginary or actual bird. And then you can refuse to give a description altogether. Or you can put a short description into the alt-text which actually doesn't help at all. Sure, you can do that. But then you have to cope with having a Fediverse-wide reputation as an ableist swine.

The only alternative is to do it right and give those who need a sufficiently informative image description what they need. In the case of virtual worlds, as I've described, "sufficiently informative" starts at several thousand words.

And this is why pictures from virtual worlds always need extremely long image descriptions.

---

Set of hashtags to see if they're federated across the Fediverse:

#ImageDescription #ImageDescriptions #AltText #Accessibility #Inclusion #Inclusivity #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #SecondLife #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds

August 31st: Mike Macgirvin has resigned from maintaining the streams repository and let the community take over

@Fediverse News

Today, on August 31st, 2024, @Mike Macgirvin ?️ has officially resigned from maintaining the streams repository. He won't shut it down, and he said he will add contributors if anyone wants to contribute, but he won't actively work on it anymore.

No link to the the source because the source is private.

The streams repository is the home of an intentionally nameless, brandless, public-domain Fediverse server application which its community semi-officially refers to as (streams). Its features include, but are not limited to:

• federation via Nomad, Zot6 (Hubzilla) and ActivityPub (optionally, but on by default)
• multiple independent channels/identities on the same account/login
• nomadic identity
• virtually unlimited character count
• full blogging-level text formatting using BBcode, Markdown and/or HTML, including in-line images
• advanced, extensive permission controls for privacy and security second to none in the Fediverse, customisable for each individual contact with 15 permission settings
• optional individual word filters per contact
• optional automatic reader-side content warning generator
• support for flagging images sensitive for Mastodon
• built-in file space with WebDAV connectivity per channel
• built-in, headless CardDAV and CalDAV servers per channel

(streams) is the latest stable release in a family of server applications that started in 2010 with a decentralised Facebook alternative named Mistpark, now known as Friendica.

The evolution in the family started in 2011 when Mike invented the concept of nomadic identity, the simultaneous existence of the same Fediverse identity with the same content on multiple server instances, to help overcome the issue of server instances shutting down and their users losing everything. It was first implemented in a Friendica fork named Red in 2012 which was turned into Hubzilla in 2015.

The streams repository came into existence in October, 2021, with a whole tree of eight forks between it and Hubzilla since 2018. Just a few weeks ago, Mike forked it into a new project named Forte, almost nothing about which is known yet, and which is probably very experimental, seeing as Mike has been working on implementing nomadic identity in ActivityPub as of late.

There hasn't been any statement about Forte's future either, but Mike is known to pass stable, daily-driver projects on to the community when he starts something new, such as Friendica in 2012 when he started working on Red and Hubzilla in 2018 when he started working on Osada and Zap. And as small as (streams) may be, seeing as it's sitting in roughly the same niche as Friendica and Hubzilla, it has become a stable daily driver for about a couple dozen users.

(streams) won't go away, but its development will slow down dramatically because new maintainers have yet to be found, and until now, Mike has pretty much done all the work on it. It will probably take longer for the dust to fully settle after (streams) has introduced portable objects as per FEP-ef61 on its way to nomadic identity via ActivityPub. Also, @silverpill, the maintainer of Mitra which currently is the only other Fediverse software to implement FEP-ef61, will have other and more people to talk to.

How the new version of the Firestorm viewer with support for Physically-Based Rendering enrages its users

As to be expected, the Second Life community is completely exploding over PBR, now that the single most popular viewer has rolled out the first version with Physically-Based Rendering. And I don't mean exploding with cheer.

The announcement thread on Reddit shows people with Nvidia GeForce RTX cards who suddenly have slideshow-like FPS for some reason. I must admit this makes me wonder because I get fairly great results out of a Radeon RX590 which is even less high-end. Under Linux. With an open-source driver from the Debian testing repos. In OpenSim, but that shouldn't make so much of a difference unless Second Life surrounds you with 2K PBR content everywhere now.

Another Reddit thread is about how Second Life users take their frustration out on the volunteer Firestorm support in Second Life as in in-world. They catch all the anger that should rather go directly to Linden Lab.

Despite what some users experience with dedicated video hardware that partly isn't even six years old, it's apparent that many of those who complain about the PBR viewers being slow are on toasters that shouldn't have been used for anything 3-D in the first place, especially not virtual worlds full of amateur-made, unoptimised content. Worlds in which optimisation is quality degradation, and ARC is a measurement for good looks.

At least among the Firestorm users, over 10% of them are on mobile hardware that's at least ten years old which usually means on-board graphics. In fact, people are still whining over 32-bit Windows support being axed because their only (or most powerful) computer is so ancient that it still boots 32-bit Windows. And yet, they use it for 3-D virtual worlds because they haven't been able to afford any computer, new or used, in a decade and a half.

So the sharp drop in FPS came not only from a new rendering engine, but also from turning stuff on that was off before and then ripping off the switches. Advanced lighting model, bump maps and normal maps, transparent water, shaders, light sources other than the Sun, the Moon and ambient...

The irony is that Linden Lab and the Firestorm team decided to turn the Advanced Lighting Model including normal maps and specular maps permanently on to make normal maps more convenient and more attractive for content creators. I mean, what they currently do is make their content for potato computers on which all graphical bells and whistles have to be turned off, including normal maps. So how do you make small surface details if you can't rely on normal maps? You build them into the mesh itself, making it vastly more complex in the course and cutting into everyone's FPS.

It's also apparent that nobody could be bothered to read up about PBR. Many seem utterly surprised about the FPS drop. They're used to Firestorm becoming slower and slower to them with every release, but not by such degrees. They seem not to have read that this would happen.

The complaints about how stuff suddenly looks differently come for the same reason: People didn't read up on PBR. They seem to think that PBR is ALM with mirrors instead of an entirely new lighting and rendering model. However, PBR also includes High Dynamic Range, and at least in Second Life, both forward rendering and the old ALM have such a low dynamic range that they render everything in pastel tones, and content creators had to tint everything in garishly cartoonish colours to balance that.

What's happening is largely exactly the same as whenever Linden Lab introduces something new: Conservative users reject it because they reject all changes that actually change stuff and can't be turned off. I guess the outcry when viewers dropped the mesh option and permanently forced everyone to see mesh must have been as big as the outcry when mesh was introduced.

At this point, it really is a pity that there's no real OpenSim forum on which people from all grids can congregate and discuss things. OpenSimWorld has built-in forums, but hardly anyone knows because nobody ever pays attention to the left-hand sidebar.

If there was a central place to discuss OpenSim matters, I guess the outcry against the new Firestorm would come a bit more slowly, but be even more extreme, and even more people would be opposed to it and PBR in general. Including those who say they'll never upgrade to Firestorm 7 while still using Firestorm 6.5.6 or 6.4.21 or so.

There would be four reasons for this. One, while the Second Life community is already so old that it needs newbies who stick around to equal users passing away, the OpenSim community manages to be even older on average, and that means even more conservative. Even more than Second Life users, OpenSim users are likely to want OpenSim back the way it was when they joined. There are still people in OpenSim who vocally oppose mesh. And it isn't too unnormal in OpenSim for users who have been around for long enough to have avatars on a 2010 or even 2007 level whereas you risk being ostracised in Second Life if your mesh body is older than 12 months.

Two, OpenSim is basically Second Life for those who can't afford Second Life. You can get land for dirt cheap, and you can get e.g. a Maitreya LaraX, LeLutka EvoX heads and Doux EvoX skins and hair for absolutely free. The latter isn't legal, but still. So it isn't only the cheapskates and the anti-capitalists who flock into OpenSim, but especially those who genuinely don't have the money to have a decent Second Life experience. And if they don't have money for that, it's highly unlikely that they have money for a decent computer. In other words, many of those who use the Firestorm Viewer on mobile hardware from before 2015 are probably OpenSim users. OpenSim has to have an even higher number of toasters per 1,000 users than Second Life.

Three, and this comes on top: Second Life has a three-versions rule. Only the three most recent versions of any given viewer are allowed to connect. OpenSim doesn't have such a rule. Certain grids or sims might limit which viewers their visitors are allowed to use and mostly do so to keep copybotters out, but in general, such a rule doesn't exist. You can use OpenSim with a Firestorm 5.x if you want to, and if you're living in a bubble on a grid that still runs on OpenSim 0.8.2.1 in which next to nobody has a mesh body, and nobody uses BoM. Absolutely having to upgrade your viewer is not part of OpenSim's culture. Instead, it's perfectly normal to keep using old viewers if you reject certain new features, e.g. EEP.

And four, most OpenSim users aren't even used to seeing Blinn-Phong, i.e. the old normal map and specular map model. Most of the time when content is illegally exported from Second Life and put back together, normal maps and specular maps are omitted. Doing so saves time that can be used to churn out more stuff which probably also explains why some importers don't even add the missing AVsitter back into furniture unless it's sex furniture. And besides, so many OpenSim users are on toasters and have normal maps and specular maps off anyway, and it isn't worth adding what next to nobody can see. It's really mostly only a few of OpenSim's own original creators who add normal maps and specular maps, but their creations aren't available on the big popular freebie sims where everyone picks up their stuff nowadays.

So criticism on PBR in OpenSim would be mixed with a lot of "change is bad" attitude. Expect people demanding OpenSim's development split from Second Life's, and OpenSim finally get its own viewer, just so that OpenSim doesn't have to take over all the "new crap" that Linden Lab whips up. Expect some saying this should have happened long ago, up to the point of some old-timers saying that the introduction of mesh was a mistake already and basically wanting OpenSim to look like Second Life did in 2008 for all eternity because that's what they're used to. And that's what they think their toasters can handle because they've all but forgotten what it's like to be surrounded by thousands of prims.

If you're a frequent partygoer in OpenSim, you're likely to know at least some of these

How Second Life's ageplay scandal that isn't even so much about there being ageplay increases "underage" avatar paranoia in OpenSim

Breaking news yesterday was an article on Medium about ageplay in Second Life. Sexual ageplay. As in sexual encounters between adult-looking avatars controlled by adult users and underage-looking avatars controlled by adult users. And how Linden Lab not only seem to ignore it to such degrees that they're allegedly doing so intentionally, but some Lindens are allegedly involved in it themselves. I won't link to the article, but here's the thread in the Second Life subreddit about this article and its impact.

To make one thing clear: Yes, we're definitely talking about adult users in all cases. For those of you who don't know Second Life: First of all, Second Life has a content rating system for sims. General is PG which means pretty much squeaky-clean. Moderate is 18+ and allows for stuff like public nudity and sexual actions in private unless a sim owner explicitly forbids it. Adult is 18+, too, and allows for everything in public.

Besides, Second Life has age verification. You have to send in a copy of your ID or something similar to prove your real-life age, otherwise your avatar will be restricted to General-rated sims. And General-rated sims, by definition, don't allow for sexual encounters because the scripted furniture necessary for acting out sexual activities is not allowed to be installed on General-rated sims in the first place.

So in this scandal, everything is vague so far. But the impact is the bigger already. In Second Life, not few users have been sceptical about the nature of avatars that look like children. But now this has turned into a veritable witch hunt against anyone and everyone who doesn't look "grown-up" by Second Life standards, also because Second Life Residents feel like they have to take matters into their own hands if the Lindens have actually been proven to do diddly-squat time and again.

The situation in OpenSim

But I don't want to talk about the Second Life side. I want to talk about how this affects OpenSim, for the vast majority of OpenSim users are Second Life users as well and closely follow Second Life news and Second Life blogs.

In OpenSim, apart from most of the underlying technology, things are a lot different from Second Life. OpenSim is as decentralised as can possibly be, and it has been since its very inception in 2007 and the introduction of federation in the shape of the Hypergrid in 2008.

OpenSim doesn't have a central authority in any shape or form. OpenSim doesn't have any centralised rules or rule-making in any shape or form either. The only reason why OpenSim has the exact same three content rating levels as Second Life is because it's used with Second Life viewers, and thus, it has to be compatible with Second Life.

But even these content rating levels become meaningless without a central authority that defines them and enforces them. And the only thing that's central in OpenSim is the development of the vanilla OpenSim server software. In OpenSim, rules only matter if you're in a place where someone else makes the rules. But you don't have to. Anyone can launch their own private or public grid and make their own rules or none at all, and as long as they're on their own grid, they live by their own rules or the lack thereof.

In fact, the only grid I know that has written-down definitions for the content rating levels is the commercial grid DigiWorldz. Even DigiWorldz allows these rules to be used "liberally" on the side of making them stricter. You may have an Adult-rated sim which, at the same time, is G-rated.

On top of that, the content rating levels are half-useless in OpenSim anyway. There is no central avatar registry either. There is no central authority that does more or less mandatory age checks for avatars. In fact, almost no grid has ever had any age verification, and even if there was something like that, it was limited to that one grid and to its own residents. OSgrid couldn't possibly automatically inquire from Metropolis if an avatar that Hypergridded in from Metropolis to OSgrid had a verified adult user. So a mechanism that could keep underage users away from Moderate-rated or Adult-rated sims doesn't exist because it's impossible to implement, much less make it as 100% water-tight as in Second Life.

Thus, the content rating levels aren't much more than "decorative" and could theoretically serve as not much more than a content warning.

So much about the OpenSim background.

No central authority means a safe haven

Now, due to this decentralised, inherently borderline anarchist ecosystem, OpenSim became a new home for people who were banned from Second Life for whichever reasons. After all, even if they also ended up being banned from several OpenSim grids, they could always start their own grid. And if too many grids blocked their grid, they could start a new one with a new identity. And so forth. But many don't even have to go that far because grid-hopping and having more than one identity slows down actions against them.

This doesn't only apply to notorious troublemakers. It applies to paedophiles just as well. Only newbies are completely unaware that there are paedos in OpenSim, but then again, many newbies who haven't been in Second Life before coming to OpenSim can't imagine that there's virtual sex in OpenSim at all. Even if they discover that all technical requirements are fulfilled.

In particular, there have been two particularly infamous cases of paedophiles in OpenSim. One was a guy from Texas who always rejected the rules of sims, the rules of entire grids and even local and national laws and substituted his own. Or rather, he claimed that whatever he did did not break any rules because of some specifics in the wording or something.

For one, he tried to talk nude adult female avatars into ageplay while remaining fully dressed himself at first. In this case, ageplay would have meant an adult user of an adult male avatar acting as an adult man and an adult user of an adult female avatar acting like a little girl. Essentially, to get around anti-ageplay or anti-child-avatar ruling, he aimed for daddyplay with grown-up counterparts, something he would have been able to claim to be perfectly legal on the sim, in the grid and in all real-life jurisdictions involved and thus unsanctionable.

Besides, however, he was repeatedly caught butt-naked next to child avatars on General-rated sims. It couldn't ruin his reputation anymore, no matter how many identities he had. But it could completely destroy that of the sims and their owners for "allowing" this to happen.

The other case was a convicted English paedophile with a different modus operandi. All his avatars were little girls as in children. He had a whole number of identities readily available for them so he could quickly register new avatars.

This was obvious from a number of points: So there were these little girls randomly appearing on sims where there was at least one more avatar. They had different names. They came from various grids. But sometimes girls from different grids had the same name. And they all acted exactly the same.

They landed on the sim. They stayed on the landing-point. It was usually or always a sim which, if it was an event location, didn't have the landing-point right next to the party. They picked out one of the avatars on the sim. And then they got into contact with that avatar via IM. The wording was always exactly identical. That guy had a notecard or a text file or a Word document or something from which he copy-pasted not only avatar names, but also always the same dialogues. I wouldn't wonder if even the intended ageplay would have acted out along pre-defined lines that he would have copy-pasted.

And this guy certainly had enough avatars to keep going for months. He could always make new avatars by registering one on another grid, copy-pasting in the forename and the surname, then having the brand-new avatar meet one of his already existing avatars and the existing avatars sending over a bunch of items to the new avatar's inventory. He eventually vanished altogether, either because OpenSim became uninteresting, or because it became too much of an effort compared with whatever else he discovered, or because he was convicted in real life once more.

OpenSim's war on child avatars

It's due to such happenings that many OpenSim users, sim owners and owners of not-exactly-tiny public grids in particular, have been up in arms against ageplay for a couple of years already. And as there's no central authority in OpenSim that could make rules against ageplay and combat it, there's no central authority to keep individuals' efforts in this direction from going completely out of hand.

One attempt at a countermeasure is the attempt at re-defining the Adult rating. The "Adult" part is to refer to the visual age of the avatars visiting a place, and the Adult rating is to mean that no child avatars are allowed. This sounds like a given, but at the same time, Adult-rated sims are often not PG-rated, but G-rated at the same time, not allowing nudity or even only scanty clothing anywhere. Sometimes, entire grids do that, but it's mostly the owners of sims having such a re-defined Adult rating who defend their one-sided re-definition.

A nasty side-effect of this, however, is that the Adult rating loses its effect as a content warning. More and more OpenSim users simply don't expect anything naughty on Adult-rated sims anymore, and they're highly irritated when they come to an on-going event on an Adult-rated sim such as Stark and see naked avatars. At the same time, nudists can't count on nudity being allowed on Adult-rated sims anymore. And there have actually been cases of avatars being permanently banned from Adult-rated sims that nonetheless don't allow nudity, but that don't announce their ban on nudity anywhere.

Another attempt is the infamous Childgate. It's a script that checks the height of an avatar, and if it's below a certain threshold, the script automatically both kicks and permanently bans the avatar. So far, so good.

Collateral damage: realistic and non-sexy avatars

But the Childgate is pre-configured to kick and ban any and all avatars under 6 feet which is 1.83m. That's taller than most women in real life, and it's even taller than many men in real life. But due to Second Life's unreliable avatar height measuring, namely up to the eyes rather than the top of the head, Second Life users quit paying attention to the height indicated by their shapes which quickly led to ludicrously tall avatars becoming the standard. This, of course, bled into OpenSim which does not have that quirk, but few people know OpenSim doesn't have it. Still, if you have a realistically-sized avatar, chances are good that you'll be kicked and banned from sims with a Childgate on the spot.

I'm not even sure if the Childgate measures an avatar's height the OpenSim way or the Second Life way. And I've read somewhere that some sim owners have configured the Childgate to kick and ban everyone under 7 feet which is 2.14m because they unironically consider avatars of that height underage.

And then there are less voluptuous versions of popular mesh bodies, especially Athena Petite. Athena Petite is basically a variant of the Athena mesh body for more realistic avatars. Athena is much more on the "sexy" side with breasts which, even at small settings, would be very likely to be inflated with silicone in real life, so big are they. Athena Petite has realistically-sized breasts. The original target audience are the same people who adjust their avatar's height to something realistic; if they're women in real life, it's often their real-life height.

However, the average OpenSim user isn't used to that. The average OpenSim user is used to completely distorted female avatars as the standard. 7' or taller. BBBBBL (big butt, big boobs, big lips, referring to a large derriere, a pair of unnaturally-sized breasts and a mouth with unnaturally enormous lips in a perpetual kiss shape not unlike a duckface). A skin tone that'd require you to sleep in a tanning-bed, but still with bright red lipstick. The avatar being nine or ten times as tall as the head is big when seven and a half or, at most, eight times would be realistic. 60% of the body height being the legs, not even necessarily including the feet which are permanently fixed in a position for 6-inch heels. And, of course, arms that are so short that the fingertips don't reach farther down than the crotch.

Athena is being perceived as a "normal" woman because over 90% of all female avatars roaming the Hypergrid since 2015 have been Athenas, often with hardly modified shapes. "Sexy" starts with Legacy which has an absolutely unnatural waist-to-hip ratio, and if that doesn't suffice, there are the various HG bodies which have an even more ridiculously huge butt and hips that are three times as wide as the waist. Well, and if there's something that's less voluptuous than bone-stock, standard, everyday, off-the-shelf Athena, it's automatically perceived as probably underage.

Even before the current situation, there have been known cases of sim owners kicking and banning avatars with Athena Petite bodies in the course of enforcing their "no child avatars" policy because they consider Athena Petite to be 14 years old at most.

But there have also been cases of avatars being kicked and banned for looking underage because they didn't check enough "sexy" marks. Realistic height plus realistic shape which results in a "bubble head". Toned-down lips, even though hardly anyone does that. Too pale skin tone. Freckles, only kids have freckles. No make-up. Hairstyle other than long flowing locks. Wearing too much pink without at the same time looking like a total slut. Wearing too much pastel. Wearing too bright colours. Wearing flat sneakers because female avatars are expected to always only ever wear sandals or high boots, in both cases with at least 6-inch heels. Wearing socks because female avatars are expected to wear black nylon stockings or no hosiery at all. Sometimes only one of these is enough for a female avatar to be flagged a child avatar.

Bleak future

Again, this has been the status quo up until that article on Medium. And it isn't like the article doesn't have any effect on OpenSim. In fact, it has already started. And I expect it to escalate further.

Soon, you'll have to max out the sexiness of your avatar everywhere all the time. Sim owners will raise the threshold of what's considered a grown-up avatar. Not only will they ban even more avatars that aren't sexy enough on sight, but avatar attachment gates will spread. These things can and do remove avatars based on what the avatars wear. And I expect these gates to be fed with more and more content which, according to OpenSim sim owners, is typical for child avatars. It already starts with all known kid mesh bodies and all known kids' clothes. I think Athena Petite will quickly be added to most of them. And I actually expect them to soon include keywords like "sneakers" or "freckles" or the like.

How hard to find are our event locations? Yes.

The mainland of Dorenas World has probably got some of the most well-hidden event locations on the Hypergrid. Let me sum them up by sim.

Landing

The festival ground is the easiest location. It's open-air, it's big, it's impossible to miss the stage, and you land right next to it either way.

There's also an amphitheatre, but I've yet to see something happen there. Anything in the grid that requires a stage happens on the festival ground.

Nihilon

Home of the legendary Rock-House that has seen the same event with the same DJ each Friday for almost ten years, first for four hours, now for five, with only three Fridays without an event.

But "Rock-House" already says it: It's inside a building. But the landing-point isn't. The OSW beacon lands you in front of the beacon which is diagonally opposite the parking-lot. From there, you still have to walk to the building, open a semi-transparent door and go inside.

The map lands you at 128,128 which is under water, and the sim is decorated under water, so you're tempted to believe it's an underwater event.

Oh, by the way, landmarks inside the Rock-House don't work properly either. They land you on the roof. Thus, setting the landing-point inside the building, right next to the dancefloor with the avatar oriented towards the dancefloor, won't work anyway.

Westend

The UnFassBar BassBar is currently home of a bi-weekly Thursday event. But it adds to the difficulty of finding it. Not only do you land outside, and the events are in-doors, but you land near the middle of an urban sim from where the event location isn't even visible. It's along a street, around a corner and along another street, and then it's inside a building with doors that can be found all over the Hypergrid, but rarely with a club inside it. At least it has a neon sign outside.

Before you ask: No, there is no teleporter. There aren't even arrows. Unless someone offers you a teleport, it's about a minute of walking if you know the way.

GridTalk

Named after the eponymous German OpenSim forum that's almost as old as the grid and founded and run by our Thursday DJ, this is the sim that makes finding recurring events the most difficult to find.

This starts with GridTalk having a whopping six event locations. Five of them have dance balls, all except the amphitheatre. Yes, another amphitheatre. At least three are used by the regular Tuesday event.

Oh, and the landing-point is in the middle which is nowhere near either of the locations. There are paths everywhere. But again, no teleporters, especially not the one teleporter that takes you straight to where the party is.

For most of the year, the Tuesday event is at the campfire in the northeast. In summer, it's on the beach in the west. The cold of the winter drives us into the club building in the southwest.

To make matters worse, that building has two clubs inside, connected by spiral stairs that aren't too obvious to find. The GridTalk-Club is upstairs, that's where you end up when you walk to the building from the landing. It's fairly straight-forward to find, even for an HG-Safari, but you have to know that it's there where an event is happening.

The Haifischbar is downstairs, and you can't even really see any traces of it from anywhere else on the sim except when you look closely enough inside the GridTalk-Club, and you discover the stairs.

To make matters even worse, we're at the Haifischbar this winter.

An honourable mention goes to the Keule, a club in the north near the campfire that was built by our very own ProgRock producer. "Keule" is one of his favourite words, and it's German for "club" as in the weapon. I've only seen him do a set there once, but our Thursday DJ has hijacked the club on one occasion this winter in order for it to see some use. Now, it's still a club inside a building, one without doors, but a building.

Dorenas World

The old landing sim and the oldest sim in the grid is an honourable mention of its own because years may pass without a single event. It has the rather spacious dance club Dancing Desire in a building with lots of glass, and the landing is close to the building, so finding your way there is not too difficult because you should actually be able to see the party itself.

That said, the grid is not beyond pop-up dance clubs such as for Dorena's birthday last year. We held a surprise birthday in a park in the east of the sim where usually nothing happens at all. Also, it coincided with the HG-Safari visiting the grid. Some travellers had quite some difficulties finding the location in spite of red arrows everywhere.

Anachronia

Yet another honourable mention is the second-oldest sim in the grid. As far as I can tell, it currently has three locations, none of which are used regularly, and none of which are easily visible from the main landing point.

One is Gulliver's, the grid's own Irish pub in the northwest and the grid's oldest and smallest party location. Back when Dorenas World was new, it was big enough. I've only experienced one event there, and that was my own idea: Since St. Patrick's Day was on a Friday last year, I suggested moving it to the Gulliver's and playing some Irish tunes. The only way of fitting the irregular guests who came that day into the club was by up to six ladies dancing on the bar counter.

Anyway, the club is outside the wall that surrounds the main area, and so you can't see that there's a club on the sim at all. Oh, and the building doesn't immediately look like a club from outside because there are some nearly identical buildings around that have nothing inside them, particularly not a club. And just how many Hypergridders would expect an event inside a tiny Irish pub built in 2010?

Then there's the Glass Onion in the east which is similarly hard to find. I've been told that it has only ever seen one event. But since I live not too far away, dibs on it, should I ever start DJing. Yes, it's outside the wall, too.

Lastly, there's a location at the top of the tower in the middle of the sim. That tower is easily one of the highest structures in the whole Hypergrid. Getting all the way to the top requires several minutes of climbing stairs or a teleporter. The only events I've ever seen there were performances by Torben Asp before he passed away, and when these happened, there was always at least one teleporter in Anachronia itself and, I think, additional teleporters in key places on the grid such as Landing.

So you think you'll have your metaverse under control? Think again! (CW: nudity mentioned, sex mentioned, BDSM mentioned)

Okay, so you're working on creating a metaverse. Maybe proprietary, non-free and closed-source, maybe free-as-in-freedom and open-source. Maybe a walled garden, maybe something actually decentralised with worlds that are federated with one another, maybe even "the Metaverse" that shall become an Internet-wide standard or a least a part of it.

Of course, you're a professional. You think you've got everything down pat. No, you've never been in a virtual world. Or maybe you've worn a VR headset for a couple minutes once or twice before you've started your development. But you think you're as much of a virtual worlds expert as they ever come, simply because you've grokked the technology, and technology is all there is to virtual worlds.

And you think that you, as the creator of this platform, have everything fully under control.

My prediction as a several-years-long user of virtual worlds: You'll fall flat on your face. You'll be caught off-guard by and overrun with unexpected user-driven developments in your virtual worlds that neither you nor your worlds are prepared for. And you will have to doubt the two above paragraphs.

And here's why:

• Virtual worlds that absolutely require a VR headset won't become popular. Virtual worlds that absolutely require a VR headset from one specific brand will become even less popular. All the popular worlds out there can be used as "pancakes" on a run-of-the-mill desktop or laptop computer with a run-of-the-mill 2-D screen that folks have at hand anyway.
• The more limited your avatars are (e.g. no lower body/legs or no limbs, just hands and feet), the higher the probability that everyone will laugh about them. And compare them to Second Life.
• At this point, you'll find out that Second Life itself is not only unexpectedly still alive after two decades, but it has evolved a lot since 2008. At least on the desktop, that's your competition. Soon on phones as well. And it doesn't need simplified, cartoonish avatars in simplified, cartoonish worlds because it isn't made to always deliver 60fps on fanless mobile hardware, so it can go all the way with graphical details.
• If you leave world-building to corporate world owners and their paid designers, you have to pay your designers well for years and decades to come so they keep on building. Otherwise, your world will go stale because everyone will have seen everything, and nobody will want to come visit it anymore except for newbies. The key to successful virtual worlds is giving users the opportunity to build. And "users" doesn't only mean rich celebrities who pay virtual land admins to plop down their designer-built mansions on their ten-million-dollar parcels.
• And even building won't happen if you make it too difficult for users to build. Guess why Second Life and OpenSim are so popular.
• Virtual headquarters of cool brands only stay cool and exciting and interesting for so long and for so many people. Especially if they can't enter them. Ditto virtual mantions owned by celebrities.
• If there's the possibility to attach anything to an avatar, people will make avatar design more flexible than what the designers have planned.
• If you have professionals as your target audience, and your avatars have lower bodies, female users will demand appropriate business attire. This means you'll have to make skirts possible.
• Your standardised skirts which have worked pretty well under your lab conditions will show rampant leg clipping in daily use. You'll learn that Sinespace, Vircadia and Overte exist by finding out that they've got their own physics-based solution for skirts. And for long hair.
• Speaking of business attire, high heels. If avatars have feet, high heels will be requested. And not necessarily with only one height. Both the virtual world standard you're building on and your engine will only support flat feet from the beginning because who could really expect this?! So implementing high heels requires either re-writing half the avatar standard and half the avatar engine, also to account for the avatar being "taller" on heels, or an ugly kluge that nobody really is happy with.
• Alts. People will have alts.
  If you ask someone interested in virtual worlds who has never been in a virtual world or maybe just for business purposes, they'll tell you that everyone will have a "digital twin" avatar in The Metaverse in the future. As in exactly one avatar.
  Ask actual spare-time users of virtual worlds, and many will laugh and tell you they've got several avatars already now. In one and the same world.
  In a decentralised metaverse, this will be even more likely and impossible to prevent. Just look at OpenSim where almost everyone who has been around for at least a couple of months has avatars in multiple worlds, multiple grids, even though you can teleport between grids, between servers with different owners and operators running different versions of OpenSim, using the same avatar. And having multiple avatars with different identities isn't rare either, even within the same grid.
• Crossplayers. If the avatar looks female, that doesn't necessarily mean that there's a female user behind it. Especially not if text chat is used instead of voice.
• If kids can use your metaverse, and there's any incentive for kids to use your metaverse, kids will use your metaverse. Especially if it can work as a "pancake" without requiring a headset. And they're very likely to get themselves cool "grown-up" avatars, regardless of whether or not underage-looking avatars are possible/available or not. They're kids after all. Why should they only play themselves in-world if they can also play someone else just like they often do in real life?
• Vice versa, just because an avatar looks like a kid, doesn't mean the user behind the avatar is one.
• Nudity. And naughty stuff all the way to virtual sex. It will happen. Users will find a way. Maybe not right away, but they will.
  You may design your world for people to build virtual office spaces, virtual after-work dance clubs and virtual live music venues. But they will build fully-functional virtual swinger clubs and virtual BDSM dungeons once they figure out how.
  And you'll be so unprepared that banning everything remotely naughty out-right, while being a game of Whack-a-Mole itself and not even backed by actual rules at first, will be vastly easier than implementing content ratings, especially regional content ratings.
• A free, open-source, decentralised metaverse will not only consist of worlds operated by staffs of hired full-time professionals. There will be private people running their own worlds, either on a machine at home or on rented Web space.
• This also means that you can't bet on land scarcity and ask premium prices for your land in a free, decentralised metaverse. Why should people spend ridiculous amounts of money on chunks of your land if they can make their own land anytime?
• The easier it becomes for private individuals to set up their own worlds in a decentralised metaverse, the more people who really shouldn't operate any kind of server will do so nonetheless. And the more people will do so just to circumvent bans because nobody can ban them from their own worlds. Another two lessons OpenSim has learned, but nobody will learn from OpenSim as long as nobody knows that OpenSim exists, and as long as everyone only acknowledges virtual worlds that have a CEO.
• Different worlds, different rules. You'll find out quickly enough how this applies to decentralised networks of virtual worlds. The OpenSim community already did: Second Life's General/Mature/Adult content rating definitions are pretty much useless if each grid can re-define them as it pleases. General-rated clothing-optional beaches are just as real as places that are both Adult-rated and G-rated and only use the Adult rating to keep avatars looking like children out.
• Different worlds, different server software versions. In a decentralised metaverse based on anything designed or developed centrally, be it the server software, be it the standards definition, it's impossible to guarantee that all worlds always run the exact same version. You'll find out the hard way when a compatibility-breaking upgrade creates a rift through your precious metaverse between the worlds that have upgraded and those that haven't.
  Don't count on all worlds upgrading ASAP either. There will be worlds several years worth of new releases behind for whichever reasons, and be it because world owners disappear under a rock for years while keeping their worlds online.
• A decentralised and truly open-source metaverse will inevitably mean forks. And the forks want to stay compatible with the original. This also means that if you mess up, and you refuse to admit and fix your mistake, world owners may increasingly switch to forks and abandon your original project altogether.
• If you implement the possibility for one world to completely block another world, in-bound, out-bound or both, this feature will be used in feuds and other kerfuffles between worlds. Or between their admins. Or between the admin of one world and one user of another.
  If you don't implement it, users of rogue worlds can run rampant, and stopping them will be difficult or out-right impossible.
• Any innovation, any new feature you add to your virtual world system will not necessarily only be used the way you intended and designed it for. Never underestimate the creativity of your users.

Those who really know their way around virtual worlds can tell you all this and more.

But they aren't other creators of new virtual worlds. They aren't virtual world CEOs. I guess they aren't even Philip Rosedale, and on top of inventing, creating and leading Second Life, this guy has also actually read Snow Crash.

They aren't academic researchers either who interview virtual world designers and virtual world CEOs and other virtual world researchers and occasionally read what mass media or tech media write about virtual worlds without ever spending more than 15 minutes in a virtual world themselves.

No, they're the people who actually use virtual worlds. Regularly. A lot. And I don't mean the newfangled proof-of-concept stuff or small worlds specialised for exactly one purpose, one task.

The actual virtual world experts are the veterans of big, established, popular worlds like Second Life, including those Lindens who actually go in-world and thus have stories to tell. And the real experts on free, open-source, decentralised virtual worlds are the OpenSim veterans.

They haven't just heard or read about something being done in virtual worlds. They've witnessed it being done first-hand. Or they've actually done it themselves.

The free, decentralised metaverse is older than you may think

So I'm writing a lot about a thing called OpenSim. Or OpenSimulator. But outside my excessive image descriptions, I never explain what it is. And for everyone who finds one of my OpenSim-related posts and knows what it is, there have to be hundreds of thousands who don't.

If you can be bothered to Google it, you might still end up none the wiser. What you discover is either a human body simulator or a Wikipedia-style website that has something to do with virtual worlds, but that's so ripe with devspeak and adminspeak that you don't understand anything. Well, if you're on a phone, you probably can't be bothered to fire up a Web browser anyway.

Second Life, but free and open-source...

The latter result is actually the official OpenSim website. No, it doesn't have anything with a better UI/UX for casual visitors. So allow me to elaborate.

tl;dr: OpenSimulator is a free and open-source re-implementation of Second Life.

If you've never heard of that either: Second Life is a 3-D virtual world created by a guy named Philip Rosedale after reading Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, the book that coined the term "Metaverse". It's developed, maintained and operated by Linden Labs, and it was launched in 2003. It had a huge hype around itself in 2007/2008.

Some claim it was shut down in late 2008 or early 2009 because nobody has heard anything of it ever since. Even mainstream mass media and tech media occasionally do. In fact, it was only the hype that was over. Corporations left Second Life and mass media with it, so that's why there was no mass media coverage of Second Life anymore.

Second Life is alive and well. It celebrated its 20th birthday last year. And it has evolved a lot since the hype. Remember those choppy, blocky in-world videos from around 2007, recorded on an utterly underpowered and overwhelmed single-core computer and compressed in glorious MPEG-2, showing ugly avatars and awkward movements? All this is a thing of the past. Second Life looks a lot different now. And two years from now, it'll look different again.

Oh, and it has adopted the term "metaverse" in 2022, trying to get its share of the hype.

...17 years old itself...

OpenSim did so, too, but 15 years earlier. In 2007. Over 14 years before Zuckerberg's announcement. When hardly anyone even knew that term.

Its development must have started in 2006. It was made possible when Linden Labs made their official viewer, that's what a client or "app" for Second Life is called, open-source. This, of course, meant that the Second Life API was laid open. This, in turn, led to the development of alternative, usually open-source third-party viewers for Second Life.

Now, in these days, not everyone was content with Second Life's rampant capitalism. Almost everything involved Linden Dollars. Freebie creators were either mobbed out of Second Life, or if they weren't, they were banned for costing Linden Labs more money than they made them. And that wasn't the only thing that people were fed up with.

So someone took the logical next step. Third-party viewers were built against the server side of the Second Life API. So why not build a whole new virtual world against the client side, against these third-party viewers? You wouldn't have to re-invent the wheel, you'd already have viewers, and people wouldn't have to re-learn everything when coming over from Second Life. They could even keep using the same application.

The project was first called OpenSecondLife, but that name just begged for a lawsuit. It then became OpenSL, but that meant everything and nothing at the same time. So it was renamed OpenSimulator. And its first public release was version 0.4 in January, 2007.

...a metaverse before it was cool...

The same year, OpenSim introduced the term "metaverse" into its own lingo by branding itself "The Open Source Metaverse" as seen in this static, archived copy of OpenSim's project website from December, 2007.

So it was not Zuckerberg who was the first to use this word for a non-fictional virtual world. And even OpenSim might have taken inspiration from an in-world conference in Second Life in 2007 that was named "Metaverse", too.

...and decentralised, not quite unlike the Fediverse

In spite of all similarities, OpenSim is quite different from Second Life. The biggest difference is that Second Life is an enclosed, centralised walled-garden virtual world. And OpenSim is not.

Technically speaking, OpenSim is only a server application for running worlds similar to Second Life. But this also means that anyone could do that theoretically. Anyone could run their own Second Life-like virtual world. It helps that OpenSim is cross-platform in spite of being server software; it's available not only for Linux, but also for macOS and for Windows which it was actually developed for originally.

So OpenSim is truly decentralised.

Now you might wonder what could possibly be so great about having lots of big and small Second Lifes if they're all separate worlds. Well, they aren't. At least most of them aren't.

For in 2008, OpenSim introduced a new feature called the Hypergrid. The Hypergrid made it possible to have an avatar in one world and travel to others, appearance, inventory and everything. Nowadays, over 95% of OpenSim's combined landmass is connected to the Hypergrid.

In other words: The free, decentralised metaverse has been reality for more than a decade and a half.

Some of you may recall Linden Labs' Second Life-to-OpenSim Hypergridding PR stunt. But that's another story and shall be told another time. Just so much: It was staged. It was all show.

Of grids and regions

Now I'm going to take a little dip into the lingo of Second Life and OpenSim.

Linden Lab refers to Second Life, the world, as a grid. And OpenSim worlds are called grids, too.

That's because they're split into square areas with a corner length of 256 metres or roughly 280 yards for those of you who aren't familiar with the metric system. These are called regions.

Unlike similar structures in other virtual worlds, however, they aren't isolated from one another. They aren't enclosed worlds within worlds. You can look from one region to another. In fact, if you crank the drawing distance all the way up to 1,024 metres, you can look across three regions and into the fourth.

Normally, all there is in a region is water. In order for something else to exist there, a so-called simulator, sim in short, has to be in place. In Second Life, each sim always only covers one region. OpenSim has introduced a feature called varsims in 2011 which makes it possible for one sim to cover a square area of theoretically up to 32x32 regions; that's about 64 square kilometres or 25 square miles. Regions with no sim running in them are rendered as ocean, and they can't be entered by avatars. The same goes for the area outside the actual grid.

This makes scaling grids easy: Sims in a grid don't necessarily have to run on the same server. Before the switch to AWS, Second Life ran three server farms for only one production grid. Big OpenSim grids are spread across multiple servers, too. Some grids even allow you to host your sims yourself and attach them to the grid which is usually even cheaper than renting a sim or even completely free-of-charge.

Of course, sims can also sit right next to one another. Second Life's mainland alone is made of thousands of them. And you can not only look from one into another, you can walk from sim to sim without using a teleporter. In the earlier years of both Second Life and OpenSim, this had the tendency of being rather wonky, especially between sims on different servers, but now it's quite reliable. In fact, even riding vehicles from sim to sim is possible. Hypergridding still requires a teleport, though.

Another difference between Second Life (or any other centralised virtual world) and OpenSim is that land in Second Life is finite. The grid has only got so much capacity for sims and so many regions available. While still considerably cheaper than especially crypto-based worlds, land in Second Life is still costly, not only because land rental is one of Linden Labs' main sources of income, but because there's only so much supply of it.

In OpenSim, on the other hand, land is practically infinite. The grids generally cover much larger areas. Unlike Second Life, no OpenSim grid has ever run out of regions. And more land can always be created by launching new grids. So even in the unimaginable case of all public grids with sim rentals being full, you can launch your own grid, and then you have as much land as you need.

One region in Second Life costs you about $250 a month, and that's in a more remote area. The mainland is even more expensive. Most OpenSim grids with sim rentals offer the same land area with an even higher object capacity for $10 a month. Some are more expensive, but especially on larger grids, $15 get you a sim on a rock-solid grid with good support. If you want more adjacent land area, you can usually rent varsims as well. And a 2x2, 3x3, sometimes even a 4x4 varsim isn't considerably much more expensive than a 1x1 sim.

Size comparison

If you've never heard of OpenSim before, you might imagine that it has to be tiny, even all grids compared.

This is actually far from being the case.

Second Life measures between 27,500 and 28,000 standard regions which amounts to over 1,800 square kilometres. Exact numbers for OpenSim don't exist as there are no stats that include all existing grids, but all of OpenSim combined is definitely over four times as big as Second Life. And again, over 95% of this are part of the Hypergrid.

OSgrid was the first public OpenSim grid, launched in July, 2007. Not only has it adopted the "Open Sim Metaverse" slogan from OpenSim itself, but it also grew into the biggest of all OpenSim grids, both in land area and in active users. Several times in recent history, most recently last year, OSgrid alone has surpassed Second Life itself in land area.

Also late last year, the Wolf Territories Grid was the second grid to grow bigger than Second Life. In fact, it has recently even outgrown OSgrid and become the biggest OpenSim grid. So there are two grids bigger than Second Life now.

However, these grids have reached their sizes in very different ways, and they're structured differently. OSgrid, for example, doesn't offer any land rentals. In fact, it doesn't even need a powerful region server. OSgrid itself only hosts a handful of "official" sims such as the various Plazas. Everything else is attached externally and hosted by the sim owners. So technically speaking, OSgrid still holds the record for running on the highest number of individual machines.

The Wolf Territories, on the other hand, started out in 2020 as a quickly growing bunch of 4x4 varsims owned by @Lone Wolf in ZetaWorlds. Several fully automated railway lines connected them. Later the same year, Lone launched his own grid and transferred all his land to it.

Two factors make the Wolf Territories grow so big. One is that Lone Wolf traditionally generates all of his own land on the grid himself using an algorithmic terrain generator. The main islands around the landing are terraformed and often had some stuff added to them, and be it a railway line. Younger sims are either untouched wilderness or owned by customers.

The other one is that the Wolf Territories have almost everything on varsims of 4x4 regions and upward, so the number of sims is not that staggeringly high. After all, the vast majority of sims covers 16 standard regions each. And yet, eight of these still cost less per month than one remote region in Second Life.

Empty World Syndrome

So if OpenSim has so much land area even in comparison to Second Life, how can it be that obscure? After all, it must have lots of users then.

Well, no.

Second Life is hardly growing. Its number of active users is more or less stagnating short of 55,000 per month.

OpenSim is constantly growing and breaking its own records. But OSgrid, slightly larger than Second Life, doesn't even have a tenth of Second Life's active users with a bit over 5,000. The Wolf Territories are hot on its heels, but still with fewer active users on even more landmass. And in both cases, this includes Hypergridders who mostly teleport in for partying or shopping. Without its number of event locations, the Wolf Territories would be even more deserted.

It's hard to tell how many users OpenSim has altogether. Grids claim they can identify alts (alternate avatars of the same user) as such instead of counting each one of them as an individual user. But there is no way of tracking users across all of OpenSim or even only the Hypergrid. And even alt identification may still be flawed if someone has avatars on multiple grids. This might affect both grids: The Wolf Territories aren't exactly the choice of newbies, so whoever makes an avatar there has already got at least one elsewhere. And OSgrid is popular not only amongst newbies, but also for parking spare alts.

So as great OpenSim is for building, it is not so good for socialising. In Second Life, you keep coming across other avatars almost all the time. In OpenSim, you really have to choose places that are populated if you want to meet other avatars:

• event locations with soon-to-start or on-going events
• freebie shopping sims that are so popular that there's always someone shopping there, but even then they may not want to be disturbed
• Lbsa Plaza, the main landing sim in OSgrid; there is always someone there, but whoever that may be does not necessarily qualify as a greeting committee, much less mentors

Everywhere else you can be lucky to come across even only one avatar.

Still close to Second Life

Feature-wise, OpenSim is largely on par with Second Life. And most of the time when Second Life introduces a new feature, OpenSim won't take too long to roll out the same feature. It does take its time, of course. Second Life has a whole full-time development staff behind itself, and OpenSim is mostly developed and maintained by four people in their spare time with some help from a few devs in OSgrid which, despite its size, is still the same experimental grid as in 2007.

But OpenSim doesn't have much of a choice. After all, it doesn't have a viewer of its own, at least none that's being actively maintained and that's sufficiently functional. It uses largely the same third-party viewers as Second Life, provided they support it.

None of these viewers have enough development capacity to basically split in two, i.e. have a largely independent variant only for OpenSim. Some special features of OpenSim have to be supported such as grid selection, Hypergridding or the distinction between avatars and non-player characters which Second Life doesn't have. But going beyond that is out of question.

Even the most popular third-party viewer for Second Life and the most popular OpenSim viewer altogether, the Firestorm Viewer, has a team of 20 people behind it, many more than OpenSim itself. But it's said that only one of them is an OpenSim user; the rest only knows Second Life. They simply don't have the capacity to maintain a separate code base for OpenSim.

Firestorm is nonetheless the only viewer with dedicated OpenSim variants. And a couple of years ago, there were actually two separate Firestorms, one for Second Life, one for OpenSim, because OpenSim itself was lagging behind in adding a new Second Life feature. This ended with the OpenSim branch not getting any updates at all because it didn't have a single maintainer anymore. Only when OpenSim had caught up with Second Life, this could be resolved by merging the two code bases again.

So whatever Second Life introduces has to be included in the third-party viewers. And whatever is added to the third-party viewers will usually inevitably have to be added to OpenSim as well. Especially if it replaces something older that's being phased out in Second Life, OpenSim can't keep it and has to implement the successor.

To put it in a nutshell, it's easier for OpenSim to add all new Second Life features just to stay compatible with existing viewers than to develop and permanently maintain its own viewer. Hence, anything that Second Life introduces will likely come to OpenSim as well.

What happened in the Fediverse and to the Fediverse since Musk bought out Twitter

One year of Eternal November: The good, the bad and the ugly

The Eternal November has been on-going for a year now. I guess it's obvious that "Eternal November" is a term coined not by the newbies from back then but by those who had been here before the first migration wave already, those in particular who aren't even on Mastodon.

It's indeed a kind of double-edged sword. On the one hand, the Fediverse suddenly became important. At least Mastodon was no longer a toy for absolute die-hard geeks like XMPP or Matrix. For more and more non-geeks, even for some non-geek-tech media outlets, social media stopped being only U.S. corporations. It felt like people began to understand that a PC or a laptop doesn't necessarily have to run Windows if it isn't a Mac, that you can run Linux on it as well and free yourself from Microsoft's spying eyes, greedy claws and controlling clasp.

It's also true that the newcomers started changing the culture in the Fediverse. Some of it was taken over from Twitter by people who couldn't or didn't want to get used to something new. Some like increased accessibility was brand-new because even Mastodon already let people do things that were difficult on Twitter. A lot of this came from how welcoming Mastodon felt to marginalised groups like BIPoC, the LGBTQIA+ community or people with all kinds of disabilities. Culturally, it was no longer otaku and furries who were dominant in the Fediverse, both groups that have been chased away from Twitter before, plus Linux geeks.

The other side of the coin

On the other hand, the technological culture changed for the worse. Before the first wave of migration that started in February 2022 when Musk declared his interest in buying out Twitter, the dominant platform in the Fediverse was probably desktop Linux. If you used any Fediverse project, you probably went all-in in getting away from GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft). Alternative search engines all the way to Searx. Linux instead of Windows. At least de-Googled Android on your phone, if not even a wholly different free and open-source operating system that doesn't come from Apple or Google at all. The average Fediverse user was very tech-literate.

All this changed increasingly with each wave of migration. Over the course of 2022, more and more people began to trickle onto Mastodon who previously hadn't used anything free and open-source before, especially not knowingly and intentionally. They didn't know what FLOSS is, they didn't know what kind of FLOSS existed, and they didn't care. For many of them, Mastodon is still the only piece of FLOSS they have ever used. Plus maybe their mobile Mastodon app, most likely if they're still on the official app.

Shortly before the end of October, when Musk actually took over Twitter, the floodgates opened. Twitter users came in millions. And they started recommending Mastodon to other Twitter users who up until this point had believed that Elon Musk had the total monopoly on micro-blogging.

Amongst these, it was the marginalised groups whom I had mentioned above who were the only ones looking for something that wasn't Twitter. They wanted a safe haven from right-wing harassment. Their own likes who had already migrated told them that Mastodon was exactly that, not only because it was very left-leaning, but also because it lacked the two major harassment tools on Twitter: full-text search and quote-tweets. Also, these people often were invited to instances created, run and mostly or entirely populated by their own kind instead of the big all-purpose instances.

Different from Twitter equals bad

Everyone else, however, followed the promise of Mastodon being "literally Twitter without Musk". And that's exactly what they expected. Another centralised, monolithic silo operated by a multi-billion dollar Silicon Valley corporation. Made by hundreds or thousands of paid software developers in cubicles. One that hands them everything on a silver platter right away without them having to do anything with an algorithm that makes their personal timeline bustle with posts from people they had never heard of before they even follow anyone. And of course with a 100% copy of Twitter's look-and-feel.

This promise almost always came along with a link to mastodon.social, implying that mastodon.social was "the Mastodon website", just like twitter.com was the Twitter website. So people piled on mastodon.social as if there was nothing else because there was actually nothing else for them. They weren't told that Mastodon is decentralised. And they themselves recommended Mastodon to other Twitter users when they didn't even know half of what Mastodon is. Including the mastodon.social URL.

In this regard, the closure of mastodon.social's registration due to the instance being completely overrun had positive effects. For starters, Twitter refugees had to learn what instances are and that Mastodon is decentralised before even registering an account because they had to go find another instance. The oh-so-convenient mollycoddling and railroading of newbies was over, at least until mastodon.social increased its capacities, at which point it began anew.

Many aspiring Twitter migrants gave up immediately. Mastodon was too complicated. They had to fire up their brains and learn about techy stuff before they could start tweeting away. They had never needed that before in the digital world. So they went back to Twitter and told everyone that Mastodon is impossibly hard to use. They're probably still on ?, waiting for the Musk-less 100% clone to come or for Bluesky to open its registrations.

Of those who made it through, regardless of on mastodon.social or having been forced to look elsewhere, many didn't stay for long. Only after settling in did they discover that Mastodon was nothing like Twitter. It looked different. It felt different. And it was dead. They pronounced it dead because absolutely nothing was happening on their personal timeline. There was no secret-sauce algorithm filling it with stuff that it thought they might be interested in. There wasn't even an algorithm recommending them users to follow.

They could have found activity on the local timeline or the federated timeline. But chances were they hadn't even used Twitter's public timeline before. Even if they had, they couldn't find Mastodon's equivalent because Mastodon's default Web interface was not a straight-away clone of Twitter's. Everything was in different places, everything was named differently, and everything had different icons, so they couldn't find anything. Not to mention that is was of course beyond their understanding what a "federated" timeline could possibly be if they were on mastodon.social because they didn't know that the Fediverse is decentralised.

After checking two or three times if some algorithm had finally kicked in and served them what they didn't explicitly ask for, they went back to Twitter without even having tooted only once. Others threw in the towel because they simply didn't manage to even use something that didn't handle exactly like Twitter.

If it isn't Twitter, we'll make it Twitter

Many others chose to stay. They'd rather put up with Mastodon's weirdness due to being different from Twitter than with a raging Nazi making all the wrong decisions and threatening Twitter's very existence by blindly firing all the wrong departments. Still, many of them didn't want something completely new, something different. They wanted the closest thing to Twitter that they could get. And Mastodon was the closest thing to Twitter that they had heard of, also because Twitter and Mastodon were the only micro-blogging platforms they had ever heard of.

While other Twitter refugees started establishing a decidedly "un-Twitter" culture, they continued to act exactly like on Twitter. It was hard enough for them to understand and accept that it's "toot" instead of "tweet". Still until today, many haven't gotten it into their heads that it isn't even "retoot" instead of "retweet", it's "boost".

They kept and often still keep on tooting as if they were tweeting. They still stay below 280 characters. They don't use hashtags because they'll never get used to there not being an algorithm forwarding their toots, and that hashtags are critically important in making your posts visible. They don't use content warnings for anything, and they don't describe their images and media. They had never done either on Twitter, so why do it here?

Their "hack" around the lack of an algorithm shoving all kinds of uninteresting stuff into their faces via their personal timeline was by opening the federated timeline and following everyone they saw. What these people posted didn't matter as long as they posted something. That's why there were so many Mastodon users with blank profiles and hardly any to no toots of their own, but they followed a completely incoherent and random bunch of hundreds of users. All just so that Mastodon felt another bit more like Twitter.

At least early on, they also demanded Mastodon itself become more like Twitter so that their likes don't have to adapt to something new. Nagging Eugen Rochko for full-text search and quote-tweets was fairly harmless in comparison to demanding the default Web UI and the official mobile app be re-styled into Twitter look-alikes. They only stopped when they realised that nothing of this would come to fruition.

A few who were experienced in Web development decided to take the lack of full-text search into their own hands before they actually knew about the nature and the culture of the Fediverse. They built their own Fediverse search engines. Proprietary, closed-source, centralised and with no way to opt out, much less opt in. And then they stood and watched in disbelief how instance after instance blocked their search engine, spearheaded by BIPoC and the LGBTQIA+ community who had moved over to Mastodon because it didn't have full-text search in the first place.

The Fediverse outside Mastodon neither knew nor cared. Many barely had any Mastodon connections. What they had instead was full-text search readily available, so even if they knew, they didn't understand all the ruckus. For them, the only bad thing about these search engines was that they were closed-source and especially centralised, contradicting the core principle of the Fediverse. Oh, and all these search engines were built against only Mastodon and nothing else because their creators didn't know at that point that the Fediverse was more than Mastodon. So people outside of Mastodon weren't even affected by any of this, especially not those who had no connections on Mastodon in the first place. Some saw it as good, some more probably saw it as discriminating.

The Fediverse does not equal Mastodon?!

Which brings me to the next point: the Fediverse outside of Mastodon. It had already existed for years. In fact, Pleroma, Friendica and Hubzilla are all actually older than Mastodon. Pleroma is older by a few weeks. Hubzilla is older by almost a year, almost four years if the Red Matrix counts. Friendica is older by almost six years and actually even predates Diaspora* by two months. But hardly anyone knew any of this.

Most newbies who had joined since February 2022 spent a whole lot of time believing that "Mastodon" and "Fediverse" mean the same, that they're mutually synonymous because the Fediverse is only Mastodon anyway. Of those who had joined since the start of the Eternal November, pretty much all did.

And they did so for months, usually at least three to five months. Some were slowly convinced otherwise when they kept reading about Pixelfed and PeerTube which were being talked about and advertised a lot. And it became increasingly clear to them that these two projects were part of the Fediverse, too. So there wasn't only a Twitter, but also an Instagram and a YouTube, and the Instagram and the YouTube were both connected to the Twitter. Little did they know that the Fediverse had more than half a dozen Twitters at that point, neither of which was significant closer to actual Twitter than Mastodon.

Others learned it the hard way. Maybe one of the Mastodon users they were following boosted a post from outside Mastodon. Maybe they themselves had followed a non-Mastodon user in their federated timeline following spree. Either way, a very non-Mastodon post appeared on their personal timeline. They were highly irritated because that post looked so weird. Mentions looked freaky because they used the full name instead of the short name. Even more likely, the post was simply way over 500 characters long. Something which these people had deemed absolutely impossible in the Fediverse because tooting over 500 characters is impossible on vanilla Mastodon. And they complained to the author about that alleged "toot" without having the foggiest idea how it could even be possible to "toot" something like this.

Or they were talking like it's the most normal thing in the world that Mastodon and the Fediverse are one and the same, and that the Fediverse is only Mastodon. Who would ever doubt that? Well, those following their talks who aren't on Mastodon themselves would. Maybe they were developers, and they had just built another Fediverse tool that'd be useful for the whole Fediverse, but they had hard-built it against only Mastodon and nothing but Mastodon because they didn't know anything else.

Whatever the cause, these people suddenly found themselves being lectured by a non-Mastodon Fediverse user about the Fediverse not only being Mastodon. It's true they had never known. But it's also true they had never wanted to know. They had never even expected anything like this. And chances were it was too much tech-talk for them. Not to mention that it felt like dozens of non-Mastodon projects suddenly intruding on their cosy little Mastodon. Not seldomly, they didn't want any of these to exist. They wanted them to go away again. Never mind that at least three of them had been around when Mastodon was launched.

I've been in this situation a couple of times myself, enough so that I believed that hundreds of people started following me in late 2022 and early 2023 because they considered me a "Fediverse guru" from whom they could catch posts that'd explain the Fediverse outside of Mastodon to them.

What certainly helped was my most popular post by far, "Re-inventing the federated wheel because you don't know that wheels exist" from around March with 288 likes that I know of. It's about nagging Eugen Rochko to introduce certain features on Mastodon while the self-same features have been readily available on other Fediverse projects for ages. And indeed, I guess this post was an eye-opener for many Mastodon users. Not only because it was me whom they learned from that other Fediverse projects already had stuff like text formatting, full-text search and quotes, but especially because it was me whom they learned from that other projects than Mastodon exist in the Fediverse in the first place. I had quite a wave of new followers on the weeks after this post, and those of them who had been around since November actually followed me to learn about the Fediverse outside Mastodon because it felt like everyone else only knew and talked about Mastodon.

But I often had to tell people in person that the Fediverse is more than Mastodon. And sometimes it was hard to tell them because it was hard for them to even grasp.

No, I'm not on Mastodon.

I'm on Hubzilla.

No, Hubzilla is not a Mastodon instance. Hubzilla is its very own project.

No, Hubzilla is not a Mastodon fork either. Hubzilla is fully independent from Mastodon.

Yes, Hubzilla is fully connected to Mastodon nonetheless. As you can see because I'm writing to you directly from Hubzilla right now.

In fact, Hubzilla is even four years older than Mastodon, technically speaking. When Mastodon was launched, Hubzilla had been around for four years in some way.

Yes, really.

Yes, this is normal. This is what the Fediverse is. A network of all kinds of different projects with different capabilities for different purposes. And not only Mastodon.

See, there's Pleroma which is another Twitter and older than Mastodon, too. And there's Akkoma, another Twitter. And there's Misskey, another Twitter from Japan. And there's CalcKey (Firefish today, but it was CalcKey back then), another Twitter. And there's PeerTube, a YouTube "clone". And there's Pixelfed, an Instagram "clone". And there's Friendica which is more like Facebook. And there's Funkwhale which is more like SoundCloud and the like. And so forth.

What I wrote completely obliterated their new worldview.

Worse yet, some people still can't accept the Fediverse being more than Mastodon. And it was even worse back then. I've heard a story from a Friendica user who was blocked by a Mastodon user for communicating with Mastodon users while not being on Mastodon. For that user, the Fediverse was a Mastodon-only walled garden, and any access to it from something that wasn't Mastodon was some kind of evil black-hat hacking.

Still today, there are Mastodon users who want the Fediverse to be only Mastodon, who might actually be in support of fediblocking everything that isn't Mastodon, even though that'd be a game of Whack-a-Mole. Others can tolerate the presence of other projects than Mastodon in the Fediverse as long as everyone using these projects behaves exactly the same as on Mastodon so that their posts cannot be distinguished from Mastodon posts. No more than 500 characters, no text formatting, no quotes, and they'd better turn those freaky looking mentions off. And "this is hard-coded and has been since before Mastodon was made" is not necessarily accepted as an answer.

Something that I found particularly jarring was members of marginalised groups writing about Mastodon and the Fediverse being a safe haven because full-text search and quote-tweets are absent from the Fediverse. Because they're absent from Mastodon. Some of them had probably never heard of anything else than Mastodon. And it was obvious that none of them had ever heard of what non-Mastodon Fediverse projects are capable of.

For almost all projects that can do something in the direction of micro-blogging had full-text search which did not exclude Mastodon toots. So there were indeed places in the Fediverse where Mastodon toots were full-text searchable as long as they were known to the respective instances. Also, most of these projects could do quotes. And Friendica, Hubzilla and the budding nameless, brandless non-project commonly referred to as (streams) could even do what would amount to "quote-tweets". And yes, with Mastodon toots. They call it "sharing", they do it by referencing the original post rather than copying it, but still.

It happened that I tried to tell these people that what they don't want on Mastodon was readily available elsewhere. That I could full-text search, quote and "quote-tweet" Mastodon posts on Hubzilla. I guess it went beyond their imagination because I never really got a reaction. It didn't help that Mastodon couldn't display quotes properly yet, and it still can't display shared posts properly, so even demonstrating these capabilities didn't have the desired effect.

In hindsight, this was actually good because these groups of users would otherwise have loudly demanded all non-Mastodon instances be fediblocked.

What has happened since then: Bluesky and the third wave

Around December, the second wave came to an end although there were still people moving from Twitter to Mastodon. This was when mastodon.social had increased its capacity. So new registrations focused more and more on mastodon.social again.

It was one thing that it often took people at least three to five months to learn that the Fediverse is not only Mastodon. But now that mastodon.social was open again, more and more people came who spent months believing that the Fediverse is only mastodon.social, especially after Mastodon itself built a milder form of mollycoddling and railroading into the official mobile app.

Still, those who have joined in the second wave and its aftermath have mostly settled in. They have learned what it means that Mastodon is decentralised. They have come to terms with the Fediverse being more than Mastodon. In fact, some have moved elsewhere entirely like Firefish or Friendica in the meantime, often taking their connections with them regardless.

This summer, Twitter closed its API to all who wouldn't pay a substantial license fee. They followed Reddit's example which had caused the Threadiverse to explode and adopt that name in the first place. Many of those who were still on Twitter were willing to put up with rampant open fascism and hatred being commonplace, but not with the official mobile app or the official Web interface. And all alternatives were killed off in one fell swoop. A third wave of migration began.

However, this wave was different. For one, the likeliness of these people wanting something entirely new was much smaller. Had they wanted something substantially different from Twitter like Mastodon or any other Fediverse project, they would long since have moved there. But they hadn't.

Besides, Bluesky was already there. And Bluesky is widely being seen as "actually Twitter without Musk" due to having been founded by the same guy as Twitter. However, Bluesky was and still is invite-only. Many would have moved there if they could, but they couldn't. And Threads wasn't and still isn't seen as an alternative because its users are regarded as a subset of the notoriously obnoxious and attention-whoring Instagram crowd.

So while people were waiting for a Bluesky invite, they had to choose between enduring Twitter's hate-mongering and enduring Mastodon's being different and complicated. When the former was no longer accessible through third-party clients, the latter became the lesser of two evils.

This brought us new Mastodon users who only use Mastodon as a stopover, like a refugee camp, until they can finally get to their desired destination, namely Bluesky. For this reason, they aren't interested in Mastodon itself at all. They don't really care what it is and how it works. They see its decentralisation as a nuisance they temporarily have to put up with. And they keep acting like they're on ? and refusing to adopt any of Mastodon's or the greater Fediverse's mannerisms. They actually hope that they can continue behaving like on ? once they're on Bluesky. It's Twitter without Musk and without Nazis after all, right?

The irony is that there will never be a Bluesky with open registrations that's so nicely and conveniently centralised like ?. As long as Bluesky has only got its one "mothership instance", it will remain invite-only because the capacity of that instance is limited. Registrations will be opened when there are more instances, and then they will be opened only for these other instances. This will be to keep people from piling upon the "mothership instance" like on all decentralised projects that were ever created from Jabber to Matrix to Diaspora* to Mastodon to Lemmy to Misskey to OpenSimulator, in fact, even including e-mail.

So when you can register an account on Bluesky without an invite, it will no longer be Twitter without Musk. It will become the same degree of complicated that keeps people away from the Fediverse because they have to choose an instance first without being railroaded to one. And until that happens, I bet that Bluesky will have grown its own culture and its own mannerisms and reject at least some of those from ?. So even if you should manage go to Bluesky, you will have to learn, and you will have to adapt.

Fortunately, not everyone who came over to Mastodon during the third wave is like this. Some may simply have been slow. Some may have refused to move from ? to Mastodon because "but muh followers, but muh fame"; some of these might have been convinced by tales from others who said that they actually get more feedback from fewer followers. Some may have believed mainstream media that had pronounced Mastodon and the whole of the Fediverse dead in early 2023, just to learn that they're alive and well when Mastodon became the talk of the town again due to ?'s increasing enshittification.

And truth be told, I guess ? was so utterly enshittified at this point that not exactly few of these people moved to Mastodon because they decided they wanted something as un-? as possible instead. And I wouldn't be surprised if this eagerness had actually driven some of them to try out other Fediverse projects as soon as they had heard about them.