OpenSim: A Grid Through Time (Part 1)

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I am a fan—and have been for years—of decentralized media: the ability to host your own thing and keep your data safe from big corporations and profit-seeking entities entirely. And, to be frank (don’t call me Frank), that’s exactly what OpenSim is. Decentralized.

But this is something I detailed in the first post I ever made about OS back in 2025, almost a year ago to the day. Has my experience changed? Have my opinions morphed?

It’s true, OpenSim has AI-generated stuff everywhere. But so does the official Second Life grid. This doesn’t really bother me all that much anymore. It’s also true there are a lot of asset rips all over OS, but if nobody’s profiting from it, does it really matter that much?

No, you shouldn’t run around Second Life with a viewer that rips assets just so you can upload them to OpenSim. In fact, I think you should learn Blender and make stuff to decorate your spaces. But you can’t stop people from doing what they’re going to do. And again, at the end of the day, nobody in OpenSim is making money from any of the things they’ve uploaded.

So there’s that. I think people in OS just want avatars and things to wear, and there aren’t many creators with those skills willing to join the Hypergrid. It’s my thought that… maybe they should? Maybe Maitreya should host an OS region and put her stuff there. If people are going to just take it anyway, they may as well have something that works. This ties more into my views on piracy and copyright, and how maybe, just maybe, there’s more to life and being online than purely making profit.

With the elephant in the room out of the way.

I’ve shut down my city in Second Life. As of Monday, it’s already offline. I decided that, despite having the money to keep it going, I really don’t feel like paying Linden Lab the huge amount they ask just to have a private region. Especially not while I’m hosting a region on the Hypergrid for five dollars. (I mentioned this on the Second Life subreddit in a discussion about region pricing and was promptly banned by the moderators for talking about OpenSim.)

Visit PhyriaL89: hop://hg.osgrid.org:80/Neo%20Machina/136/127/22

It has no utility. I’m not selling anything. It is little more than an art piece with some games and a hangout spot. And honestly? That’s the essence of what Second Life used to be.

And that’s what I’ve been wanting all this time. Because I was part of Second Life back in the old days, back when you could log on and just go talk to people, and people would actually talk to you!

Now, I will mention that sometimes on OpenSim I get guys IMing me, probably looking to virtually hook up or something. But (lol) I don’t really care about that. If I’m going to make an emotional connection with someone, well, 1. it’s not going to be a guy, and 2. it’s something that will happen over time.

But it’s there in OpenSim. It may be a small community, but the people talk. They host live events and shows every week and have done so for years.

There are no massive shopping events on a monthly basis. There aren’t thousands of people logging in to endlessly spend money on avatar items in a hyper-capitalist simulation where nearly every social aspect of the world has died.

It’s just… open.

So today, I want to showcase some random places across the vast Hypergrid.

The first place I clicked, I went through the TP interface for about six or seven pages, mainly because there are actually a lot of people online in OpenSim right now, and I wanted to find some places that aren’t super populated that people might miss. So I landed in Bluebay Cafe.

While it appears to be a nightclub at first glance, it also presents itself as a personal art piece, kind of like the way I have my region set up.

Then there’s an upper level in the cafe that showcases users from around the Hypergrid, which is a neat touch. I’ve seen a few of these people in the frequently visited OSGrid Lbsa Plaza.

Once you come outside, you find even more: an entire landscape that evokes maybe… Havanan or Cuban vibes.

You can tell whoever built this place put work into it. No incentive for making mass amounts of L$ just passion for creating a social space, a place for people to chill, meet, dance, and talk.

Imagine that. Creating something because you just feel like it.

Visit Bluebay here: hop://hg.osgrid.org:80/Paradigme/934/621/23

The next random location I grabbed is the Satori Starport. Another place that doesn’t look like it has a whole lot of visitors. But here’s the neat thing: rather than a destination hosted on OSGrid, this one is over at alternatemetaverse.com. And that’s a main feature of OpenSim and the Hypergrid, you can launch a server, put up a region, and connect to the grid, just like launching a Mastodon instance.

With that in mind, there are many, many regions to find. More than there are in Second Life.

I traveled to Satori and found a neat little space place decorated with rovers, moon landers, a space station launch, and, you guessed it, a dance club!

At Club Nova you can hit the laser-beamed dance floor (although I don’t think I heard any music), or run back outside to the blue-diamond mountains and take a nap in a spacebox (a direct rip of the Neurolabs skybox apartment, but due to 0n0 Zinner being an asshole, I think this is hilarious).

A side story about 0n0 Zinner: Way, way back in… maybe 2016? I started making my own sci-fi themed accessories and objects. In dismay at the huge prices 0n0 was asking for some of his stuff at Neurolabs, I thought, “You know what? I’m learning Blender, why don’t I just make my own!” And he took personal offense to that and banned me from shopping at his store or even visiting it in-world.

If Second Life were the real world, he’d be sued for anti-competitive behavior.

Check out Satori here: hop://alternatemetaverse.com:8002/Satori/524/460/1368

Now, let’s find a place that doesn’t have yet another dance club.

Our next spot is a place called “Abandoned Ghost Town” on the three.hills.grid.outworldz.net grid. Mind you, each place I’ve chosen has been mostly random, going off names alone. And I thought, “What better than a place with zero people in it that is also literally called an abandoned ghost town?”

And that’s not to say OpenSim is abandoned. It’s populated, for sure.

What we have here though is some kind of eerie 1800s western town that is indeed abandoned.

The saloon, while… having a danceball in it, is quite empty.

In fact, the only other partially living thing here is an animated NPC sheriff who grimaces, gun drawn…

…protecting a town where his own face hangs in the distant sky over the mountains.

There’s a deep history here I can’t even begin to fathom. I imagine it might have something to do with this graveyard.

All in all, an interesting place. You can visit it here: hop://three.hills.grid.outworldz.net:8002/Abandoned%20Ghost%20Town/134/79/31

I think that’s all I’m going to visit for this post… for now. I’ll probably do another random hop around the Hypergrid at a later time. But as you can see, this is just three places, and there are thousands to visit. You can see something of an index of places across the Hypergrid here.

If you’re interested in signing up, all you have to do is download the Firestorm viewer that allows OpenSim (because Linden Lab forced the Firestorm devs to make a version that disallows OS), then sign up, maybe over on OSGrid, and input those details under Preferences > OpenSim:

And then add me as a friend and say hi! My username is nova ayashi.