Re:Facebook plans to change its name as part of company rebrand
by KennyBlanken on Wednesday October 20, 2021 @03:19PM
(#28934932)
> Most virtual land is leased to individuals, and the leaseholder can eject or ban annoying visitors.
> Second Life is about the size of Greater London.
Both these statements are directly contradicted by https://secondlife.com/land/ which says land is bought from LindenLabs and that SL is not fixed in size but they continuously add more "land" with new users, so anyone can buy land themselves. Premium users get 1000 square meters free.
Re:Facebook plans to change its name as part of company rebrand
by Animats on Wednesday October 20, 2021 @04:20PM
(#28935916)
Linden Lab uses the term "buy" in promotional material, but it's really software as a service, hosted at AWS-West-2, and there's an ongoing monthly charge.
Second Life Main Grid size as of 17 Oct 2021 is 1786.64 square kilometers.[1] The area of Greater London is 1,572 square kilometers.[2] The number of regions changes slightly from day to day, but not by much.
Actually, they rarely do in Second Life. As I mentioned in a previous posting, in a big 3D world, being a jerk doesn't scale. You can only make trouble locally. Second Life is about the size of Greater London.
Most virtual land is leased to individuals, and the leaseholder can eject or ban annoying visitors. There's also peer pressure. People can and will tell jerks they are being a jerk. This works better in 3D than it does in text forums.
There are a few public places in Second Life that are jerk magnets. These are the "social islands", where new users enter the system after completing the tutorial. They're the bus terminals of Second Life. They're intended as transit points. Most users take one of the portals and leave for a new destination. Some new users, confused about what to do, stay there. Some losers go there to harass new users. They're the same kinds of losers found in real-life bus terminals.
People who write articles about Second Life sometimes don't get past the entry area, and they think that's typical of the whole virtual world. It's more like visiting only the Port Authority Bus Terminal in NYC and then publishing an article about your trip to New York.