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2025-06-30 07:00:15

negativepid@mastodon.social

Do you remember Second Life? In the early 2000s, it promised a second chance at success. It is now a niche tool for creators, academics, and psychologists. Now, the Metaverse is promising to fix the flaws of Second Life, but has faults of its own. We have asked AI what an ideal virtual world would be like: here's the blueprint to happiness in a virtual world from where you might not want to ever disconnect.

https://negativepid.blog/digital-worlds-and-second-chances/

#AI #SecondLife #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds

2025-06-30 11:31:49

Jupiter Rowland

jupiter_rowland@hub.netzgemeinde.eu

@Negative PID Inc. A few notes:

First of all, your link is behind a paywall.

Next, I hope you don't honestly think that only two virtual worlds systems were ever made, Second Life and "The Metaverse" which many think is the official and trademarked name of Meta Horizon (very early on Facebook Horizon, a.k.a. "Meta Metaverse", "Facebook Metaverse" or "Zuckerberg's Metaverse").

On a sidenote: The OpenSimulator community has been using the term "metaverse" for actually existing virtual worlds in its standard jargon since 2007, the year that OpenSim was first released. 14 years longer than Zuckerberg. In particular, OSgrid, the first public OpenSim grid, the oldest OpenSim grid and until fairly recently the biggest one, has officially labelled itself "The Open Source Metaverse" since 2007. Also, there are things like the Museo del Metaverso which resides in Craft-World, another OpenSim grid, the Infinite Metaverse Alliance which focuses on and is based in OpenSim, too, and entire grids like the Alternate Metaverse. All of them predate both Zuckerberg's 2021 Metaverse announcement and the 2022/2023 Metaverse hype.

While the big Second Life hype was from 2007 to late 2008, it hasn't entirely faded into obscurity. And academics and psychologists aren't that big a part of its user base. Many Second Life users have stuck around since the late 2000s or 2010s, and most are hobbyists.

If you want an insight into Second Life without actually spending lots of time there, check Wagner James "Hamlet" Au's blog New World Notes. He also covers other virtual worlds from VRChat to Horizon.

As I can't read your blog post, I do hope you've written it from the perspective of someone who actually knows a few things about Second Life, such as that it's constantly evolving, and that it's the one virtual world that's the closest in looks to Cyberpunk 2077, now that physically-based rendering is spreading. And not from the perspective of someone who only very recently discovered that Second Life was, surprisingly, not shut down in late 2008 or early 2009, and who thinks it still looks the same as back then.

#Long #LongPost #CWLong #CWLongPost #SecondLife #OpenSim #OpenSimulator #Horizon #HorizonWorlds #Metaverse #TheMetaverse #VirtualWorlds #OSgrid #CraftWorld #AlternateMetaverse #MuseoDelMetaverso #InfiniteMetaverseAlliance