tl;dr: AviTron will shut down by the end of the month; CW: long (some 9,600 characters in one post), AviTron, Alex Ferraris
Here's a newsflash for everyone interested in #
OpenSimulator:
AviTron will shut down on August 28th.
I guess #
AviTron shutting down isn't the actual surprise. It's rather AviTron having survived for more than two years plus the fact that grid founder and owner Alexsandro Pomposelli, also known as Alex Ferraris, has announced a grid shutdown for the first time. Now, if he also gave out IARs and OARs to his residents, that'd be a miracle.
I mean, he really rose to infamy when he managed to run his first grid, #
AviWorlds, into the ground a whopping 13 times within 10 years.
You can read about much of the drama on #
HypergridBusiness.
All closures were permanent and unannounced, whatever the reason for the shutdowns might have been. Now, these reasons included various kinds of drama as well as AviWorlds running out of money or Alex running AviWorlds on servers in his garage, dismissing all criticism that the power supply was absolutely inappropriate for that. Guess how the latter ended.
Never did the residents get any backups. No IARs, no OARs, and if they had invested money in the grid, they lost that, too. It wasn't like Alex couldn't or didn't want to create IARs or OARs. At least the last few times when AviWorlds came back, all the official sims owned by Alex himself looked just like before the previous closure.
In one case, not only AviWorlds went down the gutter, but so did the grid hosting company Alex had started. That hosting company took about half a dozen active grids with itself, leaving their owners without at least recent backups.
Alex eventually sold AviWorlds, backups included, to Josh Boam in 2020 and
wanted the name and the domain back shortly after. He got neither.
This incarnation of AviWorlds is still up and running.
Afterwards, Alex launched #
VirtualVille which, again, didn't even get to live for a year before it shut down out of the blue, leaving Alex' faithful followers as well as clueless newbies with no backups.
In early 2021, he came back with AviTron which, so he promised, would be different. Well, it was different in a few ways. The grid had its own hosting company again, now running in South America and staffed with cheap labour. Alex could claim that he had created jobs down there.
And he was shooting for the top. He saw the #
Hypergrid as either a competition between grids or an out-right war. Either way, he announced that AviTron would win over all other grids. It was never clear if he wanted AviTron to achieve that by having both more land area and more residents than even #
OSgrid, the biggest OpenSim grid which had had 14 years to grow to its size, or be it by actually vanquishing all other grids and becoming the only surviving OpenSim grid.
The latter doesn't sound too far-fetched, considering his aggressive tone. On #
OpenSimWorld, he was constantly lashing out against critics and even announced to doxx them in real life. At the same time, nobody was allowed to reply to his posts and comments.
Later the same year, he struck an exclusive deal with #
Sacrarium. The Kazakh-Russian grid which had been built around the distribution of illegally obtained #
SecondLife content, which was now specialising in just that, had introduced a monthly subscription fee for granting Hypergrid access to individual avatars after a series of grid blockings. AviTron's deal was for the whole grid to pay the fee so that all its residents could have free access to Sacrarium. However, Sacrarium demanded AviTron put all content on the grid on no-export, thereby at least theoretically making it impossible to take any content from AviTron to other grids. It was completely unclear where Alex wanted to get that money from.
It was then that AviTron really exploded with new users. Alex claimed that they had all found new homes. In reality, however, there were two kinds of new users. One was the freebie junkie who only went to AviTron to always get the latest new arrivals on Sacrarium first. Since these were rare, many of them began to satisfy their hunger for freebies by going around the Hypergrid and copybotting entire sims wholesale, especially when there were purpose-built, one-of-a-kind buildings on them. This led to AviTron being blocked by more and more grids.
The other kind were freebie sim owners outside AviTron. They created avatars on AviTron, went to Sacrarium, often picked up everything from every freebie store and then circumvented AviTron's no-export setting and removed the no-transfer restriction on the Sacrarium boxes. What used to be exclusive Sacrarium content was now spreading across the Hypergrid full-perm, causing some more "How dare you steal my stolen content" #
drama.
When geopolitical events rendered the Sacrarium deal null and void, AviTron lost what little appeal it had to anyone but total newbies.
By the way, there were actually AviTron users who sold copybotted Second Life content for money, either in-world for Gloebits which can be exchanged for real money or even in webshops for real money. This was illegal as per AviTron's TOS, but Alex' reaction was that if it's illegal, it isn't happening.
Speaking of content and TOS, for quite a while, the AviTron TOS said that everything on AviTron's asset server is Alex' exclusive intellectual property. This applied to what little stuff was created on AviTron, legal freebies from the rest of the Hypergrid, even when they actually had licenses on them, legal payware from the rest of the Hypergrid and even Second Life content that was circulating on the Hypergrid. Alex was publicly called out for this, and he actually had to change the TOS under that pressure. It would have been interesting to see reactions in Second Life upon lots of creations by Maitreya, SLink, BlueBerry and others suddenly allegedly being the intellectual property of an OpenSim grid owner.
AviTron is also responsible for the "Inaccurate" value for the visitor count on OpenSimWorld. It was introduced after AviTron staff had parked some 20 permanently AFK avatars on a sim owned by a resident who didn't know any of Alex' history and put full faith into him. Generally, this is a very popular method of manipulating visitor stats and pushing sims up
OpenSimWorld's oh-so-prestigious list of most popular sims, but nobody had had the audacity to place more than four AFK avatars yet, much less 20. And Alex insisted in them all actually being regular traffic.
Eventually, the pressure became so immense that AviTron was forced to retreat from the OpenSim community by and by. First, after Sacrarium, AviTron became the second of still only two grids to be completely banned from OpenSimWorld. A lot has to happen for this measure. In February of 2023,
AviTron stopped reporting stats to Hypergrid Business; before that,
AviTron ranked second in active users and first in new registrations, but only 17th in land area, being a bit more than 1/40 as big as OSgrid. With five regular monthly users for each standard region (in OSgrid, it's the other way around), it was clear that people weren't looking for new homes.
When Alex started charging AviTron residents for things that are normally free-of-charge, some expected that AviTron's end by going broke was coming closer. It wasn't to be.
The last "sign of life" was when AviTron officially closed its Hypergrid access for whichever reasons. It wasn't too much of a loss for the Hypergrid, I guess, seeing as how many grids had blocked AviTron already, some only having that one grid on their block lists. Alex was infamous for closing Hypergrid access on his grids and then bringing it back, but this time, it was final.
Now AviTron was isolated by choice, but it was blocked by large parts of the Hypergrid anyway. With the Hypergrid connection gone, no new content came into the grid. Alex says he has invited creators to come over to AviTron. I guess actual established creators of legal content were asked to fully relocate from where they had been before to AviTron where their creations would have been no-export. It's clear that and why they refused to do that. And those who referred to putting copybotted SL content back together and replacing its missing scripts if necessary as "creating" had the same reason not to follow his call.
Also, advertisement had become difficult. Hypergrid Business had stopped writing about AviTron except for the stats in late 2021. OpenSimWorld had banned the grid and its residents, but even without the ban, AviTron sims wouldn't have been allowed on OSW due to being disconnected from the Hypergrid.
Without Hypergrid access, AviTron must have lost lots of users. Three freebie hoarders must have gone elsewhere, as have the Sacrarium exporters who may now resort to stealing directly from Second Life. Even newbies who had discovered AviTron's glossy website with its spectacular pictures blistering with stolen content by Googling the term #
Metaverse must have left for greener pastures after finding out about the Hypergrid through other avatars.
With nothing left to keep the grid running for, no revenue stream, the grid's reputation in shambles and, most importantly, nothing to brag about anymore and nowhere to brag about it, it's only logical to shut AviTron down. I wonder if it'll pass out IARs and OARs this time, and I wonder how many grid residents will actually be left to ask for them. After all, he doesn't have a track record of doing so.
Lastly, I wouldn't be too surprised if Alex came back with a new grid under a new name. And sadly, I wouldn't be too surprised if he still had faithful followers who'd immediately be on board again.
#
VirtualWorlds
