A questionable OpenSim grid announced its short-term shutdown; CW: long (over 7,000 characters), (virtual) nudity mentioned, (virtual) nudity of minors mentioned, paedophilia mentioned
Okay. So NakedWorldz Grid is going to shut down on Monday.
This must have been decided only a few days ago, no more a week before the actual shutdown, maybe only five days. There was no public announcement, this must have only gone out to the various sim owners in the grid, and
only one sim owner actually said something (notice all the invites to other grids in the comments). It isn't even clear if sim owners can get or make OARs of their sims. All sims run by the grid owners have been pulled from OpenSimWorld two days ago or so. They're still online, but they're no longer advertised anywhere.
But seriously, it was clear that this grid wouldn't last for long. What's essentially the main landing sim is a "family-friendly nudist" sim. Officially, this means, "Nudity yes, anything sexual no." Officially, the idea was that people could go there and play "family on a nudist beach". Hence, it's "only" Moderate-rated whereas pretty much all other sims around the Hypergrid that officially allow nudity are Adult-rated. In fact, so are many that don't.
Now, if you've experienced a few "family-friendly nudist" places in OpenSim, you could have expected how this actually played out. If there are avatars on the main landing sim for a prolonged time, it most likely includes grid staff. As child avatars. Butt-naked kids. Staff.
Also, their "official" freebie sim offers everything you'd need for a naked child avatar. Not stashed away behind a door or so. Out in the open. And that freebie store is only one room with no walls separating anything. And it's organised neatly enough that I'd have a hard time believing that whoever put that stuff up had no idea what it is. On some boxes, the frigging box art says it all. I mean, I know that hardly any "stuff found all around the Hypergrid" freebie store owners curate
anything they slap against their walls, but still.
Whenever such a place is launched, I take three possibilities into consideration:
- This is a sincere nudism project, and the owners are too naïve and not OpenSim-savvy enough to know that this will inevitably imply paedophilia, and/or that this may or may not count as CSAM under Western legislations.
- This is a sincere nudism project, and the owners want to try hard to make sure this does not come over as paedophilia and convince everyone that this is every bit as harmless as a real-life nudist camp because they know about the implications.
- This is actually a false front for a paedo place.
Seriously, the more often I see something like this be launched, just to pull the plug on rather short notice, the harder I find it to believe in the first two options. Still, quite a few OpenSim users flocked to NakedWorldz and acquired either a free parcel of land or a whole sim. More than half the landmass of the grid is rented land.
I remember a few more places with similar concepts. All of them have vanished into thin air with no shutdown announcements. That is, I remember that one of them has moved to another grid which was entirely unknown to the OpenSim community with not even one single sim listed on OpenSimWorld; no idea if that grid still exists, much less that sim. Anyway, this was the first time I recall that someone actually launched a grid for such a concept. The fact that we're talking about a grid of its own with land rentals may be why it wasn't shut down spontaneously: The tenants had to be considered and taken care of. Closing a grid with rented sims on it from one moment to the next with no announcment whatsoever is
bad style.
The fact that a grid was built around the premise of "family-friendly nudism" makes it rather clear that we aren't talking about complete OpenSim newbies here, not only because you have to know how to run a grid (and be it a DreamGrid), but also because if you want to build a naked child avatar, you really have to know where to look for the ingredients. And why would someone go to such length and start their own grid for such a purpose? Because they probably know exactly that a sim with this concept isn't welcome in any existing grid. So naïveté wasn't in play here.
By the way, there definitely used to be paedos in OpenSim, including at least one convicted one, and that's a fact. Avatars of mine have encountered two different flavours of these. No matter whether they're gone or still around under new guises, but it isn't unlikely that there still are some.
In fact, they're the reason why many sim owners in OpenSim have "re-defined" the ratings which OpenSim has taken over from Second Life. The Adult rating now stands for "no child avatars allowed" first and foremost. And in fact, it often only stands for that. We're approaching a point at which fewer Adult-rated sims allow nudity anywhere than not. Quite often, the Adult rating means "PG-rated, but no child avatars allowed".
Sim owners get away with this easily because the vast majority of grids don't have any definition of their own for these ratings. It used to be consensus that Second Life's definitions are OpenSim's definition. It seemed futile to write that down. The only grid that did is DigiWorldz, and even DigiWorldz allows for bending these definitions all the way to rating a G-rated sim Adult for whichever reason. And the days when nudists could enter Adult-rated sims butt-naked, be kicked and banned for breaking an unwritten "no nudity" rule and subsequently have the sim downrated from Adult to Moderate by force both by the grid owners and on OpenSimWorld seem to be over.
That said, there are also paedo witch hunters in OpenSim who are
way overzealous in their definitions of what constitutes an underage avatar. They have criteria like avatar height under 1.80m (if they're Europeans)/6 feet (if they're Americans), measured the Second Life way up to the eyes rather than the OpenSim way up to the top of the head, an Athena/LaraX Petite or Legacy Perky body, a skin without a deep tan, sneakers or generally footwear without heels of at least 15cm or 6 inches on a female avatar, a hairstyle that isn't a long lush sexy mane or an outfit that doesn't max out an avatar's sexiness or badassness. If at least one or two criteria on this list are met, your avatar is a kid, and you're a paedo.
Who may be behind the sudden closure of NakedWorldz, I don't know. Maybe the grid was bullied out of OpenSim. Maybe there were actually legal threats against the grid that came in time for the grid to shut down at the end of the month. Maybe someone acquired information about the grid owners that I don't have (maybe they were actually behind earlier "family-friendly nudism" projects as well) and threatened or blackmailed them.
Fact is, however, that it's a grid with a rather questionable concept that was launched into a network of virtual worlds where not exactly few people don't even tolerate a tiny fraction of that concept.
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