I think it is time to admit SL doesn’t want us. With their turnover rate most old fogies are going to be wandering off eventually anyway, and I think in the spring of this year they realized they had made a grave error in tying their success to hardware directly marketed to us.

So, I think the effort now is to reclaim that hardware, push hard into new “Bay City” style mainland efforts, and make tons on auctions instead of the standard setup fee. Eventually I think we’ll be offered 65ks out in Linden water at auction, and the amount they make on those will be far more than 1k, lemme tell ya.

But there is another path. Sure, we can let our land assets go, but we don’t have to leave. We can stay, and minimize our financial benefit to LL as much as we can.

William Gibson when he visited said, when asked if SL was akin to the metaverse he foresaw, that SL was more of what 15 year old girls would have build covertly in the basements of disused corporate complexes. That offended me a bit then. Now, I realize that SL isn’t what is being built in those basements. SL is the corporate complex.

So, let’s use their basement. Let’s let THEM pay for our fun for a while. I respect people who have the faith in SL to go on and try to profit under so untrustworthy a landlord, but it’s not either that or leave. We can stay, and not let them erase the witnesses.

Just as the world is trying to reduce their carbon footprint, I challenge everyone who feels LL has become something ugly with this to stay and reduce their profitability footprint. Let’s stay and have fun, as we wanted to have fun when we first came, and let LL sit upstairs and wonder what all that noise is in the basement.

Thanks for keeping posting about that! :)

@Vye: That’s exactly what my customers and me are doing: reduce our land to the absolute minimum, and stay. Leaving is not a sensible option — not at the moment, anyway. And since they don’t seem to understand outrage and complaints (there are 138 pages of angry comments in the forum right now!!), maybe they’ll be sensitive to a slow land usage decrease: voting “no, Lindens!” with your wallet. I myself, my customers, and a lot of people I’ve been talking to have paid in advance for several months of usage of their openspaces. We will not abandon our land now, since it’s already paid; simply we will not renew it when its term is over. We’ll see what is the situation in 6 months from now…

I guess this became totally clear with the change of the trademark policy. It’s not an “us”, we and LL, not it’s a service provider and customers. And this decision back then was also was lost my interest in engaging with and for LL.

And actually if you read just the blog then you come to the conclusion that SL is quite a boring place. And I also noticed myself not really exploring anymore as I was mostly just in-world for office hours and was forgetting what SL really was about for me once. When visiting some random event this became clear again pretty quick though. It’s all this creativity and enthusiasm which makes SL what it is and it’s sad for LL to not talk about these things more.

I wonder if this sort of thing is more and more dying out though (I have no numbers or experience to judge that) because LL seems not really be encouraging in this field. But if it would really die out then what will be left of SL? A collection of marketing places without a culture? Sprinkled with some collaboration suites for big clients (but not really visible as they are on their own islands in p***-free zones).

But as I hear people are staying and that’s good. Even better would be though if those people also would have a say about the platform they are investing in (not money but time and creativity).

But I should maybe think about getting rid of that sim of mine anyway..

Coming up on my second sl birthday, and all that two years have encompased for me. I went from a free resident to a paying customer back to a free resident all with i the first 6 months. I have to adimit getting 300L for the $10 I was spending and the opporutuniy for free land ((that was gone by the time I started looking)). As a free avatar I also had the opportunity to buy land on a sim that was owned buy someone else other than Linden Labs which is fine as Money doesn’t mean everything but it does you may eat. And I was quite happy to spend $200+ USD on land… I had my home. I wasn’t complaing. then somewhere around April this year I decided to sell my land… it had grown from a modest 6000+ sqM to over a quarter sim. Because LL decided to start adding sim after sim to the mainland ((which I admit they can do if they want)) the price of my home went from 13L per sqm to 1L per sqm. quite a difference in a less than a years time. So am I disolusioned with the Opensim project yes. Beacuse Greed and avariciousness is still quite rampant even after so many of us have or are in the process of losing our real homes due to Greed.
Well if you are looking for me I am still in second life maybe not in as long or as much but I am still there. Like it or not, complaining about lag, tier and why we do what we do… but that is a different topic all together enough of my rambling.

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