@Kevin Davidson @Mathias Hellquist (Friendica) @volkris @stark@ubuntu:~$ :idle: It's interesting that you mention 3-D #VirtualWorlds.

#OpenSimulator (which is closer to #SecondLife than Mastodon will ever be to Twitter) offers the whole bandwidth of independence.

There are over 400 big and small public grids (= instances), a few run by companies, most run by private owners, that let you register an avatar and become a resident. If you want your own land, most of them let you rent land and/or attach self-hosted land (you can do that as well). It almost always costs money, but in comparison with Second Life, it's dirt-cheap.

How the grids cover their costs is different from grid to grid. For many grids, land rentals generate enough income. A few grids demand you rent land after a month or so. Others are financed with donations. Some admins of smaller grids can pay for the operation of their grids themselves.

At the same time, there are over 8,000 small private #OpenSim grids which are similar to personal #Fediverse instances. By far most of them run at the owners' homes on whatever Windows machines they already have. Since OpenSim was developed for Windows in .NET first and foremost and then ported to Linux and Mono, it can run on both. And Ferd Frederix' #DreamGrid makes it even easier to run your own grid without knowing anything about networks or ever touching the command line. How well these small, home-hosted grids perform for external visitors if they allow these is another story, but still.

Almost all these grids are connected in the so-called #Hypergrid which is the Fediverse of 3-D virtual worlds. It's the closest we've come so far to a decentralised, distributed #metaverse (a term that was used in OpenSim circles at least as early as 2008 when the Hypergrid was introduced), only that it's based on only one software project.

Oh, and Second Life is far from being limitless and having infinite space. Not long ago, their grid was on the brink of running out of vacant regions.

@Chris Trottier @Fediverse News They spent $13B on "inventing the Metaverse."

Only that they didn't invent the Metaverse. Either they believed they did, or they knew they didn't, but they had enough market power to bullshit everyone else into believing they did. For 99% of all people out there, #TheMetaverse refers to #HorizonWorlds.

As a matter of fact, however, the term #Metaverse has been used in conjunction with actually existing #VirtualWorlds at least as early as 2008, 15 years ago. That was the year when #OpenSimulator introduced the #Hypergrid, the first federation between independently-run virtual worlds, known as "grids" in #OpenSim lingo. The Hypergrid enabled you to visit grids with avatars registered on other grids. If anything deserved being called "metaverse," the Hypergrid became that.

Also, starting as early as 2008, single grids started using the term "metaverse" for themselves. In 2022, the oldest and once biggest German grid shut down after 14 years of operation: the #Metropolis Metaversum.

And guess what? OpenSim and the Hypergrid are still around. Not only still around, but growing. There are over 400 public grids and thousands upon thousands of small private grids, over 95% of which are connected to the Hypergrid. And there are still grids older than Zuck's Metaverse dreams which have "Metaverse" in their names such as the Alternate Metaverse which has gone by this name since late 2019.