I've recently thought about how the #Fediverse, when it comes to accounts and instance-hopping, compares with the #Hypergrid of #OpenSimulator, when it comes to #avatars and grid-hopping.

It happens in both cases. You have to start somewhere. In both cases, it's hard to know if the place you're signing up on is good or not. It's actually even harder to know in #OpenSim because you can't look into a #grid, its community and what else it has to offer through a Web browser. Or if you can, it's through the grid's website if it has one, and such websites are never critical for obvious reasons.

So you have to jump into cold water and look around afterwards. It's much easier from within, and you can see more from within. You can see greener pastures from within. And you move to these greener pastures by creating a new user account there. Unlike #SecondLife, you can make new avatars with the same name as your old one, namely one per grid.

Okay, the first difference is that OpenSim doesn't let you transfer your whole inventory, your friends, your groups etc. from one #avatar to another. Technical limitations. Bugger. But that isn't what I wanted to talk about.

The second difference is what'll happen to your old account/avatar. In the Fediverse, you usually abandon your old account. #Hubzilla and #Streams are exceptions with their #NomadicIdentity: You have a new account, but you still have the same channel, the same identity, and you just make one an identical clone of the other one, always kept in-sync.

On the Hypergrid, you may abandon your old avatar as well. But so much I can tell you: You're more likely to keep it as an alt, just in case. Technically speaking, your new avatar is your alt until you declare it your main. Some users have avatars with the same name, sometimes even the same look, on one or a few dozen grids, and they keep coming back to them.

Another difference is that most new Fediverse accounts are created as new main, all-purpose accounts. As I've said already, if someone already has an account, it'll end up abandoned. In OpenSim, in contrast, people often create new avatars with the same name even if they don't plan to move somewhere else. These new avatars are intended to stay alts for special purposes.

By the way, the Hypergrid has something that's kind of akin to mastodon.social on #Mastodon, a primary "lighthouse" grid. And that's #OSgrid, the biggest and oldest of all grids with the most active users and the most registered avatars. This grid alone has a bigger landmass than Second Life which is only possible because it only hosts its official sims itself, and all sims not run by the admins are hosted by the users and attached.

Just like mastodon.social, OSgrid is the place where new users are the most likely to arrive. And, again, they're likely to move elsewhere in both cases, once they've found out what exists elsewhere. But while mastodon.social is chock-full of abandoned accounts, OSgrid is chock-full of older (and newer) avatars kept on the backburner as alts. OSgrid is great for alts. Since it's so big, it's neutral, and other grids can't afford to block it.

So on the one hand, I find it kind of dumb how masses of people are being sent from Twitter straight to mastodon.social as if there's nowhere else to go in the Fediverse.

On the other hand, I don't have a problem with OpenSim newbies making their first avatar on OSgrid. You'll probably have an alt on OSgrid sooner or later anyway.

#Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #Alts

Is the #OpenSim community heading into the next #drama?

This time, it's about female fashion. On the one side, there's the complaint that there's hardly any female clothing to be found on freebie sims that doesn't make your female avatar look like a hooker. On the other side, there's the complaint that there's actually too much of it on allegedly the very same freebie sims.

Basically, until recently, there have always been three factions when it came to outfitting female avatars:

One faction favours outfits that are as skimpy and racy as possible. Skirts and dresses can't be too short as long as seeing what you aren't supposed to see requires camming. Bonus points if they're laced or otherwise open on the sides so that everyone can see that the avatar is going commando under a skirt or a dress. Footwear always has to be high-heeled, and the higher the platform soles are, the possible.

This faction also doesn't care about immersion; they'd wear micro-bikinis plus 4" platform sandals with 8" spike heels as everyday casual wear and on snow-covered, Christmas-themed sims because "it's just pixels," and it's always hot tropical summer everywhere on the #Hypergrid, no matter what a sim looks like. Until recently, they all had ripped #SecondLife mesh bodies, mostly Athena, sometimes one of the three outcomes of stealing SLink Physique Hourglass (Decadence-HG, BBHG, Je'Thai Hourglass).

The second faction, a great deal smaller, exclusively wears Athena, but they prefer their look to at least sometimes be less racy, less slutty. Maybe they prefer a more modest/more classy everyday casual look, maybe they want to dress in a way fitting the setting like on the aforementioned snowy Christmas sims. One of them has recently complained that clothes for such outfits are very hard to find whereas there are complaints from the first faction that they're everywhere, and they clutter up the freebie stores. It's obvious that there's a clothes-wise middle ground, e.g. denim micro-miniskirts, that's too racy for the second faction to be worn casually and at the same time too prudish for the first faction.

The third faction, much smaller than even the second faction to the point of being almost unknown, is similar to the second faction, but with the difference that they don't wear a body stolen from SL. Many are veterans who don't want to change their avatars' looks, hence they stick to the system body; a few have a body from the #Ruth2 family (e.g. Ruth 2.0 RC#2, Ruth 2.0 RC#3, #RuthToo RC#3, Ruth2 v4, LuvMyBod, Diana).

They don't even have any such super-racy clothes to wear. Such clothes have never been made for any of these bodies, neither as classic layer clothes for the system body nor as mesh for the Ruth2 family, and there aren't any clothes specifically rigged for Ruth2 v4 at all. At the same time, it's easier for them to dress more modestly because they know where to get such clothes that fit their bodies, and because system body and Ruth2 v4 users don't shy away from wearing old layer clothes or meshes by Damien Fate or even Linda Kellie (Clutterfly). However, chances are they're derided by the first faction for their choice of body, their "outdated" clothes and their prudish outfits, maybe also by the second faction for the former two points.

Chances are that the post on OpenSimWorld I've linked a few paragraphs above will deepen the chasms between these factions.

In the meantime, the first faction is splitting. One growing part is switching to bodies such as Legacy or Reborn which are "curvy" without being ridiculously so like Decadence-HG & Co. The bodies themselves are racier, you can wear them with soft, squishy boobs, and they're usually also combined with soft thighs. Also, even more extreme outfits are being imported for these bodies. Some don't even try to conceal the included thong; they do include a thong, however, because it's the only thing in the outfit that at least tries to cover up the pussy slit.

The other part is trying to defend the status quo of Athena being relevant or even the sexiest body around, not to mention typical "sexy" Athena outfits. I guess they feel like being ground up between the small but increasingly vocal second faction demanding more exposure for "boring and prudish" clothes, the tiny third faction "going on everyone's nerves" with being fully legal and the "curvy" faction being like, "Step aside with your ugly and outdated teenager bodies, we're the new sluts in town!"

Yes, teenager bodies. Athena Petite, which is actually more realistic than standard Athena, is often considered underage already now for not being as voluptuous as standard Athena. If curvy becomes the new normal, then standard Athena, as well as all Ruth2 family members, will count as 15 years old tops, and Athena Petite will count as 11 or 12 years old.

I hope this won't escalate, but I wouldn't count on it.

In fact, I wouldn't even be surprised if the blocking or banning of avatars for their looks became more commonplace. The Plazas on #OSgrid (Event Plaza, #LbsaPlaza, Wright Plaza etc.) already have very strict rules which are actually being enforced by the mods with perma-bans. So this exists, and there may be retaliation against it by the "slutware everywhere" faction. And the Amoa Nude Beach Resort only lets avatars leave the small landing zone if they're naked and automatically teleports them back to the landing zone if they're detected to be wearing clothes. So this exists, too.

Another sim requires avatars like in 2003 with no prim or mesh attachments whatsoever as of recently and automatically kicks and perma-bans each avatar that breaks this rule from the whole grid upon first strike. While this is part of the concept of making the visit not too pleasant, the commercial grid DigiWorldz used to block any and all avatars wearing an Athena body for years because they didn't want to have avatars all decked out in copybotted stuff running around the grid. I guess they've lifted the block when they realised that they were blocking the vast majority of avatars on the #Hypergrid. So this exists, too. Or if it used to exist, it still remains technologically possible.

So, as a sim owner or even a grid owner, you have all kinds of means for getting rid of avatars whose looks you find insulting. It wouldn't surprise me if stuff like this was deployed even more, starting this year. What worries me most, however, is that those without stolen SL bodies would be the first victims, especially when whitelists are being used that only contain mesh bodies which the sim/grid owner tolerates. If you don't wear one of these, you'd be out. But even blacklists can hurt users of the Ruth2 family if sim/grid owners are aware of their existence. And if only classic system avatars were to be weeded out by blacklisting layer clothes, Ruth2 v4 would become a collateral damage because avatars with this body are very likely to wear layer clothes, especially as underwear, hosiery or swimwear, whereas avatars with stolen bodies pretty much always only ever wear mesh.

Such bans can easily also affect male avatars with the same technology. Another reason to be worried.

At the very least, we might see an increasing amount of de-rendering entire avatars for what they're wearing, body included.

#OpenSim #Metaverse #VirtualWorlds #Avatars #VirtualFashion