I will definitely feature highlights and the full report on New World Notes here, though if you want to be among the very first to read it, please join my Patreon for free.
I just had a fascinating chat with Rashid Mansoor of MetaGravity, who told me about this seriously cool demo project using their Quark Multiplayer technology: A Minecraft world server that's playable (with low lag) by 100,000 concurrent avatars, versus the usual 20-100!
In the video above, you're mostly seeing bots to stress test their tech. (Up to 5,000 bots can be rendered on one screen, he says.) MetaGravity is planning to make this Minecraft server publicly available soon, when they're aiming to reach 1 million concurrent users.
My name is Danny Mac, and I’m the owner, CEO and Refounder of AltspaceVR. After Microsoft sunset the platform and dissolved the business, I was able to reclaim the marks and form a new company dedicated to bringing this incredible community space back and ensuring it's here to stay.
To be clear, Altspace was never just a platform or a product to me. It was always about the community, the vibe, and the creativity. The connections that happened because a safe, non-toxic space existed for them to happen in.
That’s my north star moving forward, to rebuild AltspaceVR as a community-first, open source platform, with sustainable models to keep it alive for good.
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Sparkle Skye takes landscape photos in addition to vendor pics for her hats, headbands, and accessories. She doesn’t shoot a lot of landscapes because she’s shooting the landscapes she builds. This one caught my eye with its spare beauty. I love a landscape that isn’t overdressed. Landscape design should follow the advice of fashion stylists, accessorize, then “remove one thing.” Skye isn’t beset with the common problem of too much everywhere all at once. What really makes me fall in love with this picture, though, is the small detail of the rain falling on the left side of the scene. Look in the foreground where the rain is falling by the desiccated remains of a fallen tree and how it’s pooling a bit as it does when the soil is dry and hard. It runs off and pools rather than soak in because the soil is too hard. There is such verisimilitude in this tiny detail.
Another piece of Linden Lab's strategy to grow the Second Life user base was just revealed:
We’re excited to unveil the Creator Partnership Program, a new initiative that invites our talented creator community to play a central role in shaping the future of Second Life. This program is all about collaboration—between Linden Lab and creators like you—to co-create content and experiences that delight both new and existing residents...
[We] invite creators of all types to help us build and improve the next generation of Second Life new user experiences and beyond. Whether you’re a fashion designer, avatar builder, home goods creator, experience developer, or just someone with a standout idea—we want to hear from you...
Work hand-in-hand with Linden Lab to shape the future of user experiences and improve Second Life. Help define how new users experience Second Life—from their very first moments to long-term engagement.
The announcement doesn't go into this detail, but "creators" refers not only to SL-centric creators, I can confirm, but includes creators who work on multiple platforms:
"We are hoping for it," Linden Lab head Brad Oberwager tells me, when I ask about that point. "And we are going to do something big with creators in May through December."
I'm glad the company is encouraging creators outside the SL ecosystem, because they'll be solely needed to actually grow the Second Life user base beyond the existing core. Linden Lab has recently partnered with SL brands like game developer MadPea and SL shopping site Seraphim, but these are already well-known creators in the community, and are inevitably architected only to serve the established community. Which is totally fine, of course, but with growth remaining flat, even after the launch of the mobile app, creators how also have non-SL experience are desperately needed.
Likely candidates? Creators more familiar with Roblox, for one, because Second Life's new scripting language, SLua, has the same basis as Roblox's Luau. As Signal Linden (Bennett Goble) told me recently:
Roblox reached 82.9 million daily active users in 2024 with 80% of those playing the popular game on mobile devices, according to Roblox's annual report.
PC was the second most popular platform at just 17%, followed by consoles at 3%.
Disappointing that Roblox hasn't been able to diversify usage much beyond mobile, which would also lead to a more diversified user base. (I.E., not just mostly kids on their parents phones/tablets.) But by the company's own data, that hasn't happened yet.
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Mark Mirror is a landscape photographer and captures some of the most beautiful scenes in Second Life such as this glorious picture of “Midnight in Paris.” Where else can midnight be so beautiful? As with all his pics, click through for the SLurl to this spot!
For more landscape beauty from Mr. Mirror, click here:
After blogging about Palia's design mechanics for growing community earlier this month, and Dr. Ruth Diaz's thoughts on them, I got a chance to join Dr. Diaz on an embedded journey into Palia. Watch our tour above! Though you won't hear me speaking due to a technical glitch, I'm interviewing Dr. Diaz as she explores the world, with our core focus being: What Palia features should open non-MMO virtual worlds learn and try to emulate?
To that question, Dr. Diaz points to the Flow Tree Grove ritual (at around 52 minutes in), where players on the same server meet to harvest these magic-infused trees.
"The Flow Tree Grove Ritual is the most impressive feature in many ways," she tells me. "It takes building a generous culture in the rest of the app, during the rest of the time people play, to make that a regular phenomena, work."
As she notes during the video, Palia players have come up with their own social principles around how to harvest these trees so that they may be shared: "[Palia development studio Singularity 6] have designed this game so cooperatively, that the community has built their own collective rule on how to enjoy something together with delayed gratification."
She even thinks the harvest ritual has become core to MMO's long-term success. "It's like a fruit of the whole Palia tree," as she puts it. "If this gets toxic their game is going under."
For myself, I was impressed by the cooking game (around 18 minutes in) where players are rewarded for working together to cook a single recipe within a certain time frame. That in itself encourages cooperation and community, and then at the end -- well, everyone knows the most fun and the best conversations at a house party happen in the kitchen.
I'm starting to prepare my much-anticipated report on the state of the Second Life economy for 2025 -- a follow-up to this report from last year -- and it will include an anonymous survey sent to SL merchants.
Below are the questions I'm planning to ask. Are there other burning queries I should include?
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
While browsing all the Happy Easter pictures of friends and relatives with their kids hunting for eggs and the laden tables of Easter dinners, I thought it was a good idea to see what Second Life residents had to offer. Second Life Easter was much more interesting, if I do say so myself. Leonorah Beverly’s “Happy Easter” is not quite in sync with the usual pastel sweetness you usually see, but that makes it interesting. I love that she takes such a departure from the expected. It is a fun picture.
Bumped up for weekend watching and discussions. Originally published on my Patreon
SL YouTuber Prisqua Newall and Hari Sutherland (author of Second Life's first coffee table book) recently invited me to have this fun debate (watch above!) about ideas for growing the user base of our favorite virtual world. We touch on a number of strategies, variations of which have been tried before (including themed welcome areas).
Somewhat hilariously, we end up agreeing on one that hasn't yet been tried: Pay people to join Second Life. Or more specifically, give YouTube/Twitch/TikTok etc. influencers an affiliate cash reward for getting their followers to become SLers over a certain period of time. There's already a number of influencers who stream SL along with other virtual worlds. (One, Carmen King, has over 1 million followers.) Their fan bases already have an incentive to join them in-world for fun events, and because their stock in trade is live video, they can help these new users get over the various tech/UX hurdles they'll inevitably come across. So it's definitely worth trying!
My own focus is on presenting/marketing Second Life as a sandbox sim game, to go after the people who already play similar virtual worlds/sandbox games. As you can see by the adamant viewer comments in the YouTube video, the term "game" rubs many the wrong way.
"[We’re] still debating what Second Life actually is," as Prisqua puts it. "And judging by the comments on my channel, people are really offended by it being called a game … like, passionately so."
It's totally fine that many (if not most) users refuse to call Second Life a game. I suspect we're dealing with an unbridgeable generation gap, not of age, but experience -- those who grew up with online games already know they're also a special kind of social/community space where real relationships are fostered and formed. Those who did not tend to see games as being trivial or kids stuff and definitely not worth their time, so take personal umbrage when Second Life is branded as one.
All that to one side, the fact remains: By refusing to market/present Second Life as a kind of sandbox simulation game, Linden Lab is giving up on the easy opportunity to grow the user base by many millions of users who are already intimately familiar with similar products, i.e. gamers. (Second Life still not being on Steam being the most obvious example of that sin of omission.)
Anyway, here's Prisqua and Hari's takeaways from this chat:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
∞ (yes the infinity sign) is a new-to-me account whom I discovered in Vyka Coy’s favorites in this third, and last, leg of the FaVes Game. She is someone who documents her life in Second Life. Her stream has no other purpose other than showing her friends, her home, her travels, and sharing her joys. Sometimes it seems that we are all taking pictures with a secondary purpose from vendor ads to blogging features to art projects. ∞ is taking pictures for the fun of it, sharing her life with us. I love this picture. The bike is so romantic with the stack of books and gathering of flowers. She’s taking a break, looking at the traffic on the river. I can’t wait to see who is in her Favorites.
I've asked this before, but here I go again: What's the point of prompt-based world building, when we already have many multiple 3D building tools which are user-friendly, feature-rich, and, well, fun? This point must be repeated, since Meta is currently promising we can build faster and smarter with GenAI Tools in Meta Horizon Worlds:
Today, we’re excited to follow up on that commitment by expanding access to the desktop editor and its GenAI tools into the UK and Canada in addition to the US. These tools dramatically reduce development time from weeks to as little as hours; accelerating the ability of creators to translate their visions into high-fidelity worlds that users love.
Watch the demo above. It makes me wonder if anyone at Meta has ever watched a speedbuild video before. Because here's one from a Sims 4 user who's not only building about as fast and with the same quality output, but enjoyably chatting as she does:
The cardboard avatars of Salt Pepper have already evolved from an April Fool's prank into a social phenomenon; now, I can report they're also an economic powerhouse in Second Life. The PMR and accessory skin have been among the top ten selling items on the Marketplace since last weekend (see below), their lo-fi displays a refreshing contrast to the super model avatar upgrades which usually dominate the economy. (And culture.)
Even more notable, PMR creator Salt Pepper tells me, the cardboard avatars continue to be popular even though she's no longer offering them for free. Now priced at L$555 (about $2 USD), Salt tells me she's sold well over 2000 copies over the last few days.
Just as notable: PMR is having its first sales event/hunt this weekend, starting April 19th at 3PM SLT, inevitably dubbed: Flat-Out Fun.
Hosted by Novel Events (follow on Facebook for updates), it comes with its own flat paper-based town in Second Life, quickly created by Alice Tartaglia:
In our definition, Specialized virtual worlds fall roughly into this category:
Virtual worlds primarily created for Education/Training, Meetings, or other Enterprise use cases -- or social worlds with limited access due to narrow usage or limited platform / geographic availability, or other barriers to entry.
So for example, Breakroom falls in the Enterprise category, while ZEPETO falls in the latter category, as it's a social virtual world that's mobile only, and mainly used/marketed to a South Korean user base.
See the (mostly) whole list below. We're also adding open source virtual worlds to this category, but that'll be in the next edition.
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Tabitha Schnyder is a new-to-me discovery in Wind Moonstone’s favorites. I ended with Wind in yesterday’s column with the first installment of the Faves Game. Tabitha is a fashion blogger. I like this picture of her. The wet hair is a nice touch. When I began in Second Life, swimming pools, lakes, and oceans had this uncanny ability to keep your hair dry. It was kind of like the rain in Oregon in which you can walk about for an hour without getting wet.
Here's the results of last week's Gen AI survey, which I took in the run-up to Second Life's official "AI & the Future of Our Virtual Community" town hall happening this Friday.
The results are pretty unambiguous: A massive majority of over 85% surveyed want some kind of regulation against gen AI-made content in the SL Marketplace, with a majority (54%) choosing this option as the one they agree with most: REQUIRE merchants tag their content as having "No AI" or "Contains AI". (Presumably this would be self-enforcing by the user community)
I reached out to Linden Lab for their commentary on these regulatory options, and they told me they'll include these survey results in their upcoming AI town hall. I'm told the event will probably not include any new announcements, and is more of a user feedback session -- and, well, this survey is that.
Given the heat and controversy over the topic, I'm actually somewhat surprised that was the most preferred option. By contrast, only 1 in 4 chose the most draconian option: BAN all Marketplace content that contains generative AI, enforced by Linden Lab staff (23.8% chose that). Maybe few chose this for technical reasons: my impression is it would be highly difficult if not an impractical lost cause to scan content for suspicious signs of gen AI, which is probably why few respondents chose this option.
It's also in keeping with the community's values around player choice. As an anonymous reader put it somewhat sardonically:
Quark Multiplayer is a new networking engine showing off the ability to deploy worlds/experiences with thousands (and thousands) of concurrent users in the same space. Coming soon to an SDK for Unity and Unreal, you can apply for Early Access here.
It's a project from new-ish UK start-up MetaGravity, I'm not too familiar with the team, but I like what they're trying to accomplish. And the site has more technical background on what they're building:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
Claire Vuissent’s self-portrait of herself as a photographer made me smile. I love her work and have since someone recommended I follow her back in 2023.
I often look at people’s Flickr faves to find new people to follow and thought it’s been a long while since I played my Faves game where I hop from one person’s faves to the next. If you want to play, too, the only rule is you keep looking at their faves until you find someone who is new to you. So whom did I find among Claire’s faves?
Reflecting on their own experience, Ghost Bird writes:
This drove me away from SL. The focus on photorealistic bodies turned the culture into a gross mirror of exactly what should be left in RL: misogyny, racism, classism, sexualisation and, ironically, materialism. Abstract, whimsical avatars and spaces obviously aren't free from bad behaviour, but I am convinced stylisation helps and photorealism hurts when it comes to socialising and community-building in virtual spaces.
I just visited the official Second Life homepage and was surprised to see it totally cramped with realistic mesh humans -- specifically attractive males/females in their 20s (as above) like a crew roadtripping to Coachella. (I.E., highly privileged people from California and/or who can afford thousands of dollars to travel there and attend Coachella.) Used to be there would be a smattering/token appearance of non-humans on the SL website but I'm not even seeing any of those at the moment.
Luther Weymann argues a large part of the SL community has not bothered upgrading anyway:
While many people in the virtual world industry buy the myth that ultra-realistic human avatars should be the end goal, my reporting about what they did to Second Life suggests otherwise. Here's the excerpt:
Myth: Photo-realistic human avatars and world graphics are the Metaverse’s end goal
This is a favorite myth among metaverse advocates who consult or work for companies producing 3D graphics cards, 3D development software, and 3D engines.
There is actually no proven relationship whatsoever between the popularity of a metaverse platform and photo-realistic graphics. Despite this, a wealth of metaverse startups and platforms frequently announce new plans to roll out ever more realistic environmental graphics, and ever more eerily human-like avatars.
The very most popular platforms, Minecraft and Roblox, are intentionally low-fi, immersive through their physics and responsiveness. Their whimsical avatars are similarly abstract.
Why this is likely relates to their core user base: People in their teens and pre-teens, who are often still uncomfortable and unsure about their own real life identity and appearance. This seems even more acute for teen girls and young women, still negotiating the social expectations and judgements around their real life presentation; presenting them with a lifelike avatar to customize is effectively asking them to take even more social expectations and judgements.
We also have something of an opposite proof point.
At launch, Second Life avatars were human by default but not realistic. The internal prim creation tools encouraged the construction of avatar attachments (robot helmets, furry tails, etc.), which led to a wide variety of avatar types and environments to explore.
The arrival of mesh in Second Life in 2010 -- high resolution 3D files created in offline software and then uploaded into the virtual world -- greatly changed this dynamic:
HELIX is an upcoming metaverse platform powered by Unreal 5 that I've been tracking for quite awhile, and the folks at developer Hypersonic Laboratories just sent me this video showing off its many features. Some highlights that jumped out at me:
You can build a map as large as Manhattan. (Which they already did, on 1:1 scale.)
Sandbox mode enables SL/Minecraft-style, live multi-player building.
Highly customizable avatars including animal/monster/anime/etc. options. (Though the video unfortunately only shows off various dudebros.)
The overall vibe is very much GTA Online-meets-metaverse platform, and that's by design:
While more mainstream gamers are super excited by the highly anticipated but long-delayed release of GTA VI, the modding community has been building on GTA V in impressive ways. FiveM, an astoundingly popular modification of the game created by community developers, usually attracts more players than the official GTA Online on Steam.
In fact, Hypersonic is actively reaching out to GTA modders to help build the HELIX creator community -- and is even signing up creators who've been dissed by Rockstar along the way. From the official announcement they also sent me:
As controversy over Generative AI content in Second Life continues, here's a survey on how Linden Lab should deal with the subject in the online Marketplace. Choose the option you support MOST (or disagree with the least).
In one option, creators have a choice of tagging their content as having "no AI" and use that as a selling point. (And since it's a voluntary option, creators could still use gen AI and fib about it -- and risk getting called out on it by the community.)
In another option, creators must label their content as either having "No AI" or "Contains AI".
In still another option, gen AI is banned outright, and Marketplace users can flag suspect content for investigation by Linden Lab, with various penalties if it's confirmed to have AI.
