"The End of The Road" For OSgrid, Second Largest OpenSim Virtual World To Close After 19 Years of Operation

 

With virtual worlds being dominated by Second Life and VRChat, OpenSim gets only a relatively small amount of users these days, about 164,000 monthly users compared to about 600,000 to 750,000 of SL. With over three hundred OS worlds, it doesn't usually make much news when one closes. But a few days ago, OSgrid, the second largest one, announced that after nineteen years it was finally "The end of the road."

 

 For 19 years, OSgrid has been more than just a server or a platform. It was a digital frontier built on a radical premise: that an open, decentralized metaverse could thrive entirely on community, trust, and shared architecture. Today, it is with a profound sense of loss that the OSgrid board must announce the end of this journey. We are officially calling it a day.

It wasn't lack of usership that was the problem, the grid remains the second-most OpenSim world used. It wasn't from a lack of staff keeping it up, according to them the team remained dedicated. The reason the nineteen year old virtual world was deemed beyond worth saving was because of one single hacker who took advantage of the grid's open code framework to flood it's infrastructure with huge amounts of junk data  "Our inventory items table exploded from 3 GB to a crippling 139 GB, turning routine 10-minute database backups into 12-hour ordeals. Our assets are effectively poisoned." 

 

The damage wasn't from one single attack, but repeated ones that were not stopping. when the staff discussed how to stop them, the only way to do so was to abandon their philosophy of an open grid and change to a closed one, "to truly end the attacks, we would simply have to permanently lock down the grid. We refuse to compromise the very soul & model of OSgrid just to keep the lights on. Spending 11 hours a day in shifts—blocking attacks and cleaning up poisoned data—is no longer sustainable as a volunteer effort. We have survived and combatted many forms of attacks over the decades, but Entropy has finally won."

 

Hypergird Business stated twice in the past two years, OSgrid was down for a month, once in March 2025 to clear it's database of corrupted information, and June this year, blamed on "metadata size limits."  

No more registrations to the grid are being accepted, and the final membership meeting was yesterday, Sunday October 18. The grid will close at Midnight, December 31. 

 

Sources: Hypergrid Business, OSgrid

 

Hat tip: Fluffyfoxy364

 

Bixyl Shuftan 

 

Linden Lab "Celebrating 14 Years of SL With Investments in Its Future"

When Sansar was finally opened about a month ago by Linden Lab, the response from Second Life's residents has been mostly negative.    So perhaps is should have been no surprise that the Lab would issue a statement of some kind reassuring it's customers of it's existing virtual world that it would be continuing to maintain and improve it as much as ever. Yesterday, August 29, Linden Lab issued a press release announcing a "set of investments into Second Life and its communities," including customer support, attracting new residents, and "enhancements to our engineering support." The Lab went on to say the amount of money budgeted for the following year in these investments is in the "millions" of US dollars, "We at Linden continue to be impressed by what we witness from Residents every day, and we want you to know that we share that commitment to and love for Second Life. "

Linden Lab listed the following as among what it plans for the following year:

We are hard at work upgrading all of the SL infrastructure and moving it to the cloud, which will bring a wealth of opportunities to Residents near and far, and allow us, among many other things, to make SL more performant for Residents across the world from us. It may also allow us to introduce new products with more flexible pricing.  

We’re working on several features to increase the value of Premium subscriptions. Most recently we gave Premium members priority access to near-full events, and shortly, we’ll be ready to unveil another bit of exciting news for subscribers. 

We're building out a series of great extensions to Windlight (code name: EEP!), which will give value, flexibility, and new marketability to land, and will make Windlight settings tradeable assets.    

We have an extension to the animation system in the works (code name: Animesh) that will allow non-avatar objects to use more powerful and efficient skeletal animations the way avatars can today, and even more changes planned for creators and merchants later in the year. 

We’ve also got new experiences and events coming. An exciting new grid-wide gaming experience is coming soon! The team can’t wait to share the details with you in just a few days. Also in the works for this fall is an updated Halloween Haunted Tour, with new spooktacular events to celebrate. Not to mention, we’re turning 15 next year - SL15B, baby! That’s an incredible milestone and we are looking forward to collaborating with you to produce an amazing celebration.

It's not yet clear if this "exciting new grid-wide gaming experience" is what Patch and Dee Linden were hinting at during the SL14B or not. But it should be interesting to see

Read the press release by Linden Lab in it's entirety Here.

Bixyl Shuftan

SL14B Theme Announced, Infrastructure Build Applications Being Accepted

The Second Life Birthday celebrations aren't for another four months, in June. They don't even have their logo yet. But already preparations are being made for the event.

In group chat of the Second Life Birthday Volunteers Group, Doc Gascoigne (doctor.gascoigne) announced the theme for this year's SLB: "Carnivalesque." Doc went on to say, "and we are thinking of having a masked ball."

On the Second Life Birthday blog, the application for Infrastructure builder, such as the roads, the welcome area, and the various stages, has been posted for those interested to fill out.

We are looking for people who are able and willing to build a sim-wide stage or welcome area for SL14B. The ability to create original content in mesh is required, though additional purchased elements are acceptable. We need the builds to connect to our theme and have to be done before the first week in June.

BEFORE you fill this out, make sure you are familiar with the SL Community Celebration and our build requirements from last year (subject to minor changes) (http://www.slcommunitycelebration.info/infrastructure-build-requirements-for-sl13b/)

If we are interested, we will contact you via email and in-world to set up a time to talk. Please be prepared to provide a sketch of your planned build.

Deadline for sign up is April 1, 2017, 12 pm SLT.

Probably the most noted SLB infrastructure builder has been Mikati Slade, the three-time builder of the "Cake Stage."

Further details will be announced as they come in.