Category: Musings

Linden Lab adds Phone Verification to Second Life Discord Server Access – A step too far?

I’ve been in the Second Life Discord server for some time now, since I was granted access as an Alpha tester for the mobile app. I was very pleased when they finally made the server public recently. To be able to post any messages in the server you now have to link your Discord account with a Second Life avatar account. I’d say that’s fair enough, it provides a layer of accountability that is reasonable.

That is of course until yesterday someone posted:

I verified with an alt

Which reveals a big flaw in that idea.

So what was the Labs solution? They added the requirement to “Verify Phone”, which is what I was presented with this morning if I wished to post in any Channel in the Discord mobile app.

While I understand they want to protect the server and themselves from misbehaving members, I think the mobile requirement is a step too far.  I think this step may put people off participating. Including myself.

Of course the Lab knows my real life identity, but I don’t think people should have to hand over a phone number to be able to use a Discord server. A well known blogger has the same requirement on their server and I just didn’t join on the grounds of that.

What makes this more of a joke is that today getting a phone number is almost as easy as creating an alt avatar account. Unfortunately Google Voice that offer free numbers aren’t available in the UK and equivalent services are paid for. Adding another security layer, that’s easily bypassed, seems unnecessarily futile and could negatively impact Resident  engagement.

Addition:

First reader comment received directly minutes after publishing:

they tell how much they value being anonymous and then they did that. Pissed me off big time

Second reader comment via Bluesky:

Great… I just joined the server a couple of days ago and now this happens – and I feel like leaving the server again. I honestly don’t want to add my phone number for verification

Third response received directly:

Just saw this – and just left the server. lol

From Bluesky:

I was able to chat 4 hours ;D – than they activated phone verification…. SOOORRYYYYY

Another comment via Bluesky puts a slightly different spin on the topic:

It’s more of a moderation used in and by big server all over discord.

This is to verify the account holder is human and not a throw away account used for trolling/spamming sure the system is not perfect but stops 97%-99% of unwanted behaviour.

Anyway discord doesn’t share this number with third parties

While this might explain things a little, the Lab should make this detail clear in the server description or rules text.

But the discussion continues some time later:

The official Second Life Discord server is so great that I quickly left it. I have no desire to talk to uneducated people who comment on topics they know nothing about. I don’t usually dehumanize, but what’s there is a zoo.

Firestorm Zero!

Tomorrow the 14th of March there’s going ot be a Roundtable about Project Zero (accessing Second Live via a web browser) and it’s roadmap going forward.

Last night there was a Zoom call with Philip Rosedale,Sntax Linden and the Firestorm Viewer development team along with a collection of bloggers.

We will be getting browser access to the Firestorm Viewer.

They hadn’t actually given it a name, because the name “Firestorm” technically belongs to the developers, so Linden Lab can’t call it that. However since both Linden Lab employees and the Firestorm developers have been referring to the project as “Firestorm Zero”, that’s likely what it’ll be.

There is however a catch…250L$ for 5 hours of viewer time. To clarify that’s a “bundle” of time, like mobile phone minutes. The 5 hours can be spread over multiple sessions over a period of time.

So why are they charging, while offering Project Zero access for free? It’s fairly straightforward, they’re matching demand with the Firestorm sessions. There is a capped number of sessions for Project Zero, so you basically have to wait in line for a session to be available. With the paid Firestorm sessions you get a virtual Windows PC, running in the Amazon Cloud, to yourself. Although obviously they may limit the number of passes sold initially to manage load. It will however be operating at a financial loss to begin with. Pricing is being based on what they expect costs to fall to as GPU market costs come down.

I thought the easiest way to demonstrate how well it works, I made a few gyazo video clips:

The blue loading screen took about a minute, the Firestorm progress bar took about 2 seconds.

My Homested, a mainland parcel and a CDS venue:

Cyber Fair:

Warehouse 21 Club:

In a crowded place like that, I’d normally bump at least one or two people on the way out, but that was so smooth, it was frankly better than my hardware. However what happened at the end of that clip was evidently the equivalent of a crash, you’re presented with a download page for the desktop viewer. (Edit 15/3/25: If you get kicked out, your browser will redirect to your Account Dashboard).

It wasn’t all smooth sailing to start with though, this was a visit to the same venue about 12 hours earlier and the login process showed more Firestorm loading dialog:

I described it as “like using SL on my old i5 laptop with 16GB of RAM” in an email at that time, I guess they took the hint and turned up the virtual host PC’s specs!

Tech bits we were told:

  • 1920 x 1080 Resolution video
  • Frame rate 30-60fps
  • Local chat logs won’t be saved, but IM logs will
  • Preferences will not sync from your desktop, (that might not be preferrable anyway on a different system) but any settings you customise on the virtual host viewer will stay for your future sessions. (I didn’t find this to be the case)
  • Login, teleport and loading times are expected to be much faster, but busy locations may still be..well…normal for SL.
  • Snapshots to Disk won’t function because the viewer is running on a remote virtual PC, so people taking photos will have to use “Send to Email” option or other methods instead. (Send to Flickr or Primfeed were mentioned.)

You will buy the bundles of time from your Account dashboard on the Second Life website and will have a link to where to log in from wherever you want. The passes are expected to go on sale on Friday 14th.

The question of whether access bundles may be included as perks with paid subscription plans was raised, it might be possible in the future. A question that I thought of and have emailed to Philip, is whether the bundles will have an expiry period in which they must be used. It’ll be interesting to see what gets announced at the Roundtable.

Community Roundtable Announcement post

Firestorm Zero Annoncement post

A Message to copybotters and Second Life Content Thieves

There was another Zoom Call with Linden Lab yesterday. This one was a little different though, since it wasn’t just the Blogger Network this time, it was Creators as well (90+ attendees). What’s so big that they want to tell all of us at once? Well, Content Protection apparetly:

This call will bring together bloggers and creators to focus on a crucial topic for the Second Life community: content protection. Protecting the integrity of creator work is at the heart of our platform, and we want to share updates and gather your feedback on this important issue. This session will focus on our commitment to and actions in protecting creator content in Second Life, including legal enforcement efforts, advancements in tools and processes, and our ongoing collaboration with the creator community. While challenges remain, we are dedicated to transparency, continuous improvement, and working together to shape a safer, more supportive environment for creators.

(quoted from invitation email)

What does it mean?

Well it means, lookout copybotters and other content thieves. The below doesn’t just apply to objects like mesh clothes or bodies, it’s any content such as animations that are included as well.

In the past Linden Lab hasn’t pursued instances of content theft, beyond a stern letter and a DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) takedown order. Which obviously isn’t much of a deterrent.

That’s about to change. Dramatically.

From now on, if you’re found to be creating copies of other creators’ items, you won’t just get asked to take it down. Your Account will be Shut Down. You may have a store with a thousand items that you genuinely made yourself, it won’t matter. It will ALL go. That DMCA letter will be accompanied by a Cease & Desist. Meaning you will now incur liability for anything you do after that date.

They’re going even further though. If you are teaching people how to illegally copy Second Life content, the Lab will be after you too.

If you’re one such fraudster you’re probably thinking “I’ll just create another account”. But did you cash out some of those ill-gotten gains with any of your avatars? In which case the Lab knows your legal identity (required to process the transaction) and will go after the Individual person, not just the Avatar.

Here’s the contentious part of their change of approach; If you knowingly buy copied stuff (to maybe save a few L$) you could be in trouble too, potentially losing your account.

So the key points here are:

  • Linden Lab will now consider such practices as theft from the original creator and act accordingly
  • If people are creating, teaching others to, or buying copied content the Lab will be after them.
  • Account and all content will be deleted, even any legally created stuff.
  • Focus on the legal individual, not just the avatar account.
  • Action will be taken against websites hosting any copied content
  • If you upload Second Life content that you didn’t create, to another platform or game, you’re accountable not the platform and will be legally pursued
  • There will be a new category of support ticket added for reporting alleged instances of content theft
  • Open Source viewer doesn’t mean an Open platform
  • Action will have an “Immediate and Chilling effect” (Philip Rosedale)
  • Action from the Lab will be “egregious*, don’t be the one I find first” (Brad Oberwager)

*Extremely bad in a way that is noticeable

How are they going to know? Well if I told you their intended methods, they wouldn’t work.

Of course these things are complicated and there could be issues, but the key point for content thieves is this:

THE LAB IS NOW ACTIVELY LOOKING FOR YOU.

Speaking your Mind, a conversation with Brett Linden

Sometimes speaking your mind can land you in a lot of trouble, or it can get people to listen. My post “Not very early (or equal) access“, was one of those times. I had bloggers giving me positive feedback, that I’d said what they were thinking, then folk saying on social media I might have upset people.

My thinking was that someone had to say it and what’s the worst that could happen?

Fortunately in this case, it got someone to listen. This was not just anyone though, it had Philip Rosedale, Brett Linden and Brad Oberwager listening.

On Tuesday night (4pm SLT, Midnight for me) I had an email from Brett Linden inviting me to discuss the contents of my post in a Zoom call.

Obviously I replied immediately with my ascent. I knew if I left it until my morning, it’d be another 18-24 hours before it might get looked at, and this is part of the issue that needed discussing.

Brett had reached out to discuss further the points I’d raised in the post, which I was pleasantly surprised at. The main issue was that a couple of prominent bloggers appeared to have got early information about Project Zero, Second Life in a web browser. This as you can imagine, annoyed every other blogger in the Blogger Network and outside of it. I had it confirmed by Brett that, yes, they got an embargoed “advance briefing” before Christmas, but they didn’t have early access to the browser platform. Now rather than me trying to pick through facts made available to me, I’m going to quote from a follow-up email:

We try to engage and respond to all bloggers who reach out to us directly and we do separate meetings and outreach all the time to other bloggers either proactively or in response to their inquiries. Both Inara and Hamlet do in-depth daily “news”-style reporting on Linden Lab and as a result we are in frequent communication with both of them since they are publishing almost daily to a fairly large audience. While they did get (and honor) embargoed advance access to “Project Zero,” that was not meant in any way to disrespect or diminish how we view the importance of the larger blogger community.

To be clear, our outreach strategy on any news and information that we release will not always be the same – bloggers will frequently get early access but there will be times that we do not pre-announce some news and/or a major media outlet (e.g. New York Times, etc.) might also be the first to break a story.  I want to also acknowledge that as a business we make decisions that not everyone will always agree with – but I hope that the big picture and context of our commitment to more and frequent open communication and transparency isn’t lost in translation. In the last three months, we’ve made progress in holding more community meetups and direct one-on-one meetings, and we have several more lined up for 2025 — so this is an evolving process and we are learning as we get feedback 🙂 We will continue to try to be better at communicating and so I appreciate your candid thoughts on how we can do better.

It was a good conversation and I came away feeling that they really are trying to be better and their hearts are in the right places.

Something I learned is how many Lab employees make up the Marketing team, which includes all the Labs socials. I’d pictured something like the scene of a corporate office block, a sprawling mass of cubicles covering a whole floor, with Strawberry in a corner office. It’s actually just two of them; Brett & Strawberry and they’re only human.

If you think back a year or even just six months, these things didn’t happen. If you told me back then I’d have a one-to-one call with Linden Lab Marketing, I’d have been very skeptical indeed.

There’s a saying that comes to mind here “To respond is to give importance”. The fact they reached out and responded to me, a small blogger with minimal reach compared to others says a lot about their commitment to improve.

So the way I see it now, they’re making leaps and bounds in their communications with the community, there’s just been a couple of stumbles along the way. Which, after yesterday’s call, I’m more than happy to forgive them for and give them a hand up. Especially since the other stumble (the early release of financial numbers while the bloggers were under embargo) wasn’t actually on them.

With that out of the way, onto what else he had to say. With Philip now back at Linden Lab, 2025 is going to be focussed on “Putting the Lab back into Linden Lab”, as in a testing and experiments place where you try stuff to see what happens and if anything goes BANG or not. So far we’ve seen two ventures that are part of this initiative; AI Character Generator and Project Zero browser access, with varying results. (When a friend gets ejected and banned from a store group and region, because of the actions of their AI bot, in their absence, I’d call that a BANG for sure.)

There is another forthcoming Zoom meeting that is apparently going to be something big, because it’s not just the bloggers that are being invited. So anyone reading this, that’s previously received an invite to a Zoom call with the Lab, don’t ignore the next one.

Not Very Early (or Equal)  Access

Last night, Thursday 2nd January, there was a meeting between members of the Second Life Blogger Network and Linden Lab executives. I didn’t attend this meeting(although I did get an invite), but I’ve heard enough that I didn’t really miss much (apart from watching Philip Rosedale almost dancing in his seat with excitement apparently). This wasn’t because the topic of discussion (browser based access to Second Life) wasn’t interesting, more due to the fact there was a public announcement barely hours later.

When Bloggers are promised early/advance notice on upcoming features, maybe that notice should be more than a matter of hours? What good is advance notice if they have no time to prepare content before an almost immediate official announcement?

If I’d attended the meeting, it’s quite unlikely I would have got a post prepared with proper test screenshots and meaningful comment, between the time the meeting ended and the public announcement was published.

This brings up a equality (or favouritism) issue among the bloggers. It’s my understanding that at least one prominent blogger had published their post on the subject (which was quite lengthy and included screenshots) while the meeting was still in progress, strongly suggesting they *did* have much earlier knowledge than the others at the meeting.

It makes me again question how much respect the Lab has for the Blogger Network, or understanding of fast moving social media.

During the Zoom meeting held on 6th December we were told about the financial investment amount that the Lab had put into Second Life and were told categorically not to disclose those numbers, to my knowledge no-one did. We were led to believe there was going to be a “big reveal” of the numbers in the New Year, I also thought maybe it was a test to see if we would keep quiet/could be trusted. However on the 19th of December these figures became public, primarily via a store owner creator releasing it everywhere after a meeting with the Lab. The next day (in my timezone) we were emailed to say “yeah, you can talk about it now”, a bit late maybe? Were we an afterthought? At 4.46pm SLT, probably. Since Second Life is a global community, spanning many timezones, I have a suggestion:

If you have some news to be shared, specify a date and (crucially) a time at which the news can go public and also when the related public announcement is going to be made. The details of which should be communicated to all parties at least 72hrs in advance. Doing that would get around the issues mentioned and we could all be co-ordinated in our posts and announcements.

I believe Philip said they will look at a discussion on the platforms use of social media, but since I wasn’t present I don’t have an exact quote. I look forward to seeing what comes of that.

Bring your Alt to Life with the new AI Characters in Second Life.

So the clock said 23.44 and I was about to go to bed, when an email arrived. What’s this? AI Characters? I thought it was some kind of AI based avatar creation tool for new residents, but no.  It’s like the old SmartBots system but you control an alternate avatar account instead of an object.

As I read through the information I got more excited and couldn’t wait until the morning to let you know what’s coming.

It’s a web interface that lets you define personality traits, behaviours, ways of speaking etc, the information provided says, basically the more you put in here the better it works. Then further along the process you provide the name and password for the Alt you intend to control.

These are screenshots of the beginning of the process, which look very promising so far. Even better given the time right now, the pages seem to work on a mobile.

This is more than a ChatBot or Greeter though, as well as simple instructions like “follow me” (given by private IM or local chat), you will be able create more advanced commands for interacting with objects and the environment.

To me this could dramatically improve immersion in Roleplay situations, particularly for new arrivals to a location when no regular players are online, or an ever present barkeep for example. Maybe I’m hoping for too much, but from what I’ve read, hopefully not.

I’m going to have a more thorough look at this and share some more, but for now, here’s the link to the official Announcement.

Linden Lab, THIS is the kind of stuff you need to be briefing your Blogger Network on!

The Call…to Mobile and a note on Unity

On Friday night I was in a Zoom conference call between a collection of bloggers and Linden Lab Executives.

If you’d told me that 5 years ago when I started my little blog, I wouldn’t have believed you. So thank you Linden Lab for the opportunity. Brad Oberwager (CEO of Linden Lab) did say that they wanted our honest opinions, so here it is.

The focus was on the Second Life Mobile App and what’s on the horizon. There’s a lot to go through, so please bear with me.

I’ve addressed these not in the chronological order that they’re going to arrive, but roughly the order I think they should have, with their ETAs.

  • Address Bar – Q1 2025
  • Notecards – Not on the slides but Grumpity Linden said “Three Months Plus”
  • New account creation – December 2024
  • Persistent chat logs & Group Notice Push notifications – December 2024
  • Item level avatar editing – Early Q2 2025
  • Lobby – Q1 2025

Franky I think the app shouldn’t have gone to Public Beta until the first three were added, but they’re finally coming. Simply because if you told someone about the App, they’d go try it and find they couldn’t do much and delete it. Maybe a New Year big splash release with these features might have been better.

Address Bar: One of the major missing features in the mobile app is getting around. Currently in both the Alpha & Beta versions, you can only go to the Mobile Showcase locations and your Favourites (the ones stuck at the top of your desktop viewer). Fortunately this feature coming soon that will allow you to enter SLURL location addresses and also Share them using your device’s native Sharing system.

Notecards: One of the bloggers raised a question about notecards, particularly for CSRs (Customer Support Representatives) for creators. If a customer has a problem, they may send a notecard detailing the issue.

However on the mobile app there’s currently no way to open them,so the CSRs are tied to a PC in order to read the notes and respond. Grumpity Linden revealed that they are working on a way to read them. However it’s likely to be in a different way. Since there’s no access to avatars Inventory on mobile, the in-progress solution is to have the notecards read out in a chat dialog. This will be a great step forward for this group of Residents, but sadly they’ll have to wait a little longer. The timescale for this ability is estimated at three months or more.

Note: this was right at the end of the call, past the official end time, so several attendees had left and not many people will have heard the above.

New Accounts: Pretty self explanatory, despite the app not being targeted at new signups, this needed to be here at Beta Release. If people see screenshots or hear about there being this cool new app and they weren’t an existing Resident, they’d have been stuck.

Persistent chat logs: Peviously on the mobile app, if you log out and back in your conversation history will be lost. In an update this month, the chat history will be stored locally on your device.

Item level  avatar editing: Something that wasn’t mentioned much, but is featured on the presentation slides is individually worn items adjustment.

Lobby: Basically a holding screen showing you stuff while the world loads. They probably spent ages on it (speculation) but I don’t see it as a big deal. The only tempting point on the slide image is “Reach mid-tier and lower end devices”, perhaps this needs a little more emphasis, if the intention is to attract users with older tech.

Comment on Unity

A last point made by Philip Linden regarding a pre-submitted question. Paraphrased: “Now that Linden Lab have a working visual rendering engine on the Unity platform, will the desktop client move to Unity?” In short, no.

The reason for this is fairly simple, according to Philip: “The Unity engine can’t render as many avatars in close proximity.”

I know for a long time people have been harping on about this at Meet the Lindens events, now they have an answer and a reason.

Summary:

Well done Linden Lab, your mobile feature set is nearly level with the Lumiya Viewer (2012-2017 RIP), except with additions of Mesh & BoM but minus Inventory. I’m sure they’re sick of that comparison, but it was ahead of its time and is an unavoidable benchmark.

The Zoom call on Friday is likely to be the first of several to come. Perhaps this process of reaching out and connecting with Bloggers & Vloggers, allowing early previews, should have started before the Beta public release. That way the Lab may have been dissuaded from releasing an under-developed product.

So as I said in my previous post on this subject, do give it a go, but don’t expect too much yet. Then come back in a month and try again, it is after all still a Beta version.

Selling your Virtual soul for others gain

Back in 2021 I wrote a piece about Avatars as Brands, I’ve a few more thoughts on the subject.

With some input from Draxtor Despres, I came to the conclusion that the term “Brand” only applies once money is involved. However increasingly these days people are making “brands” of themselves in an attempt to promote themselves and be popular, but is that the right word? Maybe it is, but not in the same way as I previously meant it. While people mindlessly create social brands in an attempt to be noticed, they’re usually not receiving any financial gain for them. So what’s being sold, who’s gaining? The social platforms on which they promote themselves. I would say that what people present online as their “brand” is more of a “persona” than a brand, if it’s not an actual business. They just need to read a dictionary. I don’t mean that everyone creating personas are in the wrong, it’s the marketing industry that has led people to be using the wrong terms and encouraged them to become a brand and maybe even  an “Influencer” , where they sell their metaphorical soul to promote products they never use that they feature in their content.

Blogging is a bit like this sometimes,depending on your platform. Lately I’ve done several posts featuring a particular Second Life creator’s products. I’m not affiliated to them (or any stores) as regular readers will know. I purchase the items myself, which is fine. Although after the fourth post in a month, I did start to question myself. Then on top of that something happened that made me reconsider this approach and my blogging practices. If you think about it, I purchased items from that brand, spent time on staging photos and a credits list, to show off that brand’s merchandise. So the creator actually benefits twice, the item cost and free advertising. Put like that it sounds kind of daft. In this case it’s the brand and ultimately Linden Lab that benefits not the prompting platform, this blog. Although obviously I do have some more nice clothes too.

The Second Life economy and technology has changed over the years however. Whereas once you could have brought a full outfit, made of clothing layers and prims for about $400L, that amount might now buy you a part of the outfit, like a set of Mesh PBR-Textured gloves or shoes (the more time and skill required to make modern clothing items raises the prices). So whereas once the price of an outfit could have been shrugged off because the equivalent amount of cash wouldn’t buy you a cup of tea in real money; now it’ll cost you two expensive coffees and maybe a piece of cake. Which is why I didn’t purchase a number of recent releases from that store and will be a lot more selective in my purchases generally going forward.

Read the previous post on this topic: Avatars, Brands & Personas

Header image via MidJourney (AI has occasional uses.)

Second Life Mobile for All

Last year I signed up for the Alpha Testing programme for a Second Life mobile app, restricted to Premium Plus subscribers. It was pretty flakey back then. But fast forward to Thursday 14th November and it’s now been made available as an open Beta for every Second Life resident and works pretty well.

So should you download it? I’d say Yes, but limit your expectations. This is not a desktop equivalent or replacement, more a companion app. You can walk about, change between saved Outfits and Teleport to your set Favourite locations and a few specific places. Chatting in groups and nearby chat works well enough and you can pay items such as rent boxes or shop vendor boards(making a use-case). Streaming music as you may find playing in a club is a feature too, but I’ve not tried visiting such a location on the app yet.

I have been giving the latest version of the Android app a go and it’s a great improvement on the early Alpha builds. One thing I’d definitely recommend when first trying it out is make sure you have a lot of space! It can take a while to get used to the controls and you don’t want to be stuck in the corner of a sky box while you experiment.

I used my homestead Bloodrose Bay simply because that’s where I happened to have been last. It turned out to be quite a good choice. The buildings I have set out are spacious inside and there are some with and without doors to enter. There’s also what’s often the bane of SL exploring..spiral stairs, indoor and out.

While this all looks pretty good for a mobile viewer, nothing apart from the trees have PBR (Physically Based Rendering) textures. Hopefully Linden Lab will get their shiny new texture system to work in their shiny new app.

The unrezzed white things down there are trees with PBR textures.

Screenshots taken on a Google Pixel 7 using default app settings.

The aim of the app is to try and bring back old residents that have left SL, because “It’s not on mobile” is apparently a reason many no longer log in. I wasn’t amongst the bloggers invited to a Zoom call with Linden Lab executives (Edit: turns out they sent the invite to a different email address, so I’ll be watching out for the next one!) to discuss/announce all this, so I’m going on quotes from a couple of people that were:

I’m impressed with what Linden Lab have created and would have been great all round, if it weren’t lacking PBR support. However the target audience (old users that haven’t logged in for ages) are unlikely to have any PBR clothing in their inventory anyway.

PBR clothing is just blank without any fallback textures. Which is the way many creators are going.

Link: Official App Promotion Page with Downloads

What’s PBR: Second Life Wiki

What’s in another Name ?

I just changed my Second Life Last name, from Bloodrose to Nightwish.

I may have got a little carried away at the fact one of my favourite band names became available to choose from. I’m now sitting thinking more about how this will impact things.

I updated my Display name to show “Ava Nightwish Delaney” inworld, as per my previous post on this subject. Most social platforms let you update such things fairly easily (except Meta,so I don’t use theirs) thankfully and I don’t use too many, compared to some bloggers.

How long will I keep the name, I’m not sure yet.

The Last name I really want is Delaney, but I can’t see that happening.

Update 17/11/24 : I kept it for about 48hrs. Fortunately having Premium Plus allowed me to change back pretty painlessly. Another lesson learned.