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.