I Need Your Help

[Cristiano]

Spending some time recently in the main SL forums (eek) has reminded me of the reason I started SLUniverse 21 years ago, and this site in 2018. I think it remains incredibly important to have a space that people can speak about virtual worlds such as SL (well, at this point only SL it seems) without being afraid of running afoul of TOS and putting accounts at risk.

As you know, heavy handed moderation has never been my style. When I have had to step in, it has been to protect this community itself (the recent blog post allegations), or to deal with those who sought to just be disruptive beyond what could be reasonably tolerated. I have put very few limits on discussion here. I am also less willing now to be quite as diplomatic as I have been in the past. Life is way too short, as I almost learned quite literally.

I would like to grow this site again. Not to the levels of SLU (god, that became a nightmare honestly), but to grow beyond where the site has kind of leveled off to. Obvious my absence in 2022 and most of 2023 for personal and health reasons played a part, but I still think this is a site worth continuing and growing.

That is where my request for help comes in. I would love to hear your thoughts on how to grow our community, and to receive help in adding to it. I would love to keep this site vibrant and a place for discussion that does not get stifled. A site can run pretty much on autopilot, but that is not what I want. SLU and VVO have always been my vision for what an online community can be. Please help me keep that vision alive.

 

[Sid]

People discuss in so many different places these days. Discords, all the social media, Youtube. I think it will be hard to revive the SL part of virtualverse.one.
That most of the regulars here haven't been in SL for a long time doesn't help much either I'm afraid. Most of us aren't particularly interested in SL or other virtual world discussions anymore.

I tried to revive the SL section here when you were more or less absent by starting threads about every news item I found even halfway interesting about SL for a few weeks.
No big success. If someone new comes with a post or a question, they expect reactions, discussions. Not one post in a day.

The reason I'm more active on the LL forums now, is not because they are better, far from that with their sometimes harsh moderation, but at least there is still some active discussion about Second Life going on. The only real success numbers over here are (American) politics and all kinds of fun posts.

I'm all for an effort to revive things, but I have no clue how to.

 

[Cristiano]

VVO's Discord server does get SL discussion, and I also have it pull in threads from /r/secondlife. I have noticed the lack of interest in SL here as well. Not sure why that is, but I would love to make it more active. I do see people from here online, so I know that some are still active in SL. I normally sign in daily still, I go through phases with it.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

IMHO web forums and blogs are mostly a thing of the past. The only thing which still works for blogs in terms of SL is fashion stuff, and freebies. The others are mostly a shade of their former glory.

People nowadays are too lazy for forums, they use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and that's it for most of them. So getting more SL related traffic would be quite hard to achieve. And what's quite popular amongst many avatars nowadays is Flickr as well.

First thing to start could maybe an in world presence, a small meeting point with connected SL group to promote this forum.

Reg. the lack of SL discussions here: IMHO the forum here lacks branding in that kind of way. Sluniverse was one of its kind, but most people don't get that VVO does cover SL as well.

AND if you really want to grow the community back, also bring back some oldies, having Snapzilla back would be a start. At least in terms of read only archive, so that these pictures are accessible again. I do know it's quite complicated, but this was one thing which really was unique and could bring back some traffic as well.

 

[Soen Eber]

I'll put an ad I made in my profile and wear a VVOne Evangelist tag, don't know what else I can do but I'm open.
hmm ... can't post a flickr image. Damn.

 

[Cristiano]

IMHO web forums and blogs are mostly a thing of the past. The only thing which still works for blogs in terms of SL is fashion stuff, and freebies. The others are mostly a shade of their former glory.

People nowadays are too lazy for forums, they use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and that's it for most of them. So getting more SL related traffic would be quite hard to achieve. And what's quite popular amongst many avatars nowadays is Flickr as well.

First thing to start could maybe an in world presence, a small meeting point with connected SL group to promote this forum.

Reg. the lack of SL discussions here: IMHO the forum here lacks branding in that kind of way. Sluniverse was one of its kind, but most people don't get that VVO does cover SL as well.

AND if you really want to grow the community back, also bring back some oldies, having Snapzilla back would be a start. At least in terms of read only archive, so that these pictures are accessible again. I do know it's quite complicated, but this was one thing which really was unique and could bring back some traffic as well.

There is an in world group, I will promote it more. I can also set up a meeting place. At this point, I am not rebranding VVO.

As far as Snapzilla, it is not a matter of it being complicated. I could easily bring it back, but not the previous images. Unfortunately, the entire site and archive were deleted by the host when I was recovering in 2022.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Oh that's a pity with Snapzilla, because the interesting part of it would have been bringing back the old archives.

And given the fact that nowadays there are far more image hosting sites around than 15 years ago, it is probably not worth the pain to revive it without the archive.

 

[Essence Lumin]

I'll put an ad I made in my profile and wear a VVOne Evangelist tag, don't know what else I can do but I'm open.
hmm ... can't post a flickr image. Damn.

I had trouble finding a free site that didn't put frames or some junk around my image. Imgur used to be good. You can put up free images on github but if you are not at all technical it is likely to be too much of a pain. The same almost goes for nearlyfreespeech.net. You pay for what is used so if it was just a couple of images $5 might last you a year. But definitely not recommended if you are not technically oriented. What I actually use to host my images is dirt simple. With my mail provider, fastmail.com I get 10 gigs of free web storage a year. Just click files, then upload. However that won't work for you since you have to pay for their mail service at a minimum of $30 / year.

 

[Cristiano]

I'll put an ad I made in my profile and wear a VVOne Evangelist tag, don't know what else I can do but I'm open.
hmm ... can't post a flickr image. Damn.

Why can't you post Flickr?


night swimming by Cristiano, on Flickr

You can use the BBcode in the Share menu on a picture to post it.

 

[Tirellia]

I will get round to posting some more. I joined SLU for the SL after all. The silly stuff is always nice but I scroll and don't post.

 

[Charlemagne Allen]

Post more tits.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

I just realized I have no memory of how I found the old SLU. I lurked a bit and decided I liked the place then created an account. I suspect I must have been googling help with some sort of second life thing and it came up. Obviously random walk ins like me are rare (that aren't trolls or bots).

There is a lot of value also to being a small community. I do enjoy the sharp contrast between this forum and a place like reddit or even many of the bigger message boards I've been on.

I also agree with Bartholomew Gallacher 's statement that old fashioned forums like this have specialized appeal. ...which is also true for SL in general. Some forums like this were a big part of my late childhood and I enjoy them.

I'd think the best way to recruit people might be just to approach people in SL groups who you think would get along well here.

 

[gblack]

IMHO web forums and blogs are mostly a thing of the past. The only thing which still works for blogs in terms of SL is fashion stuff, and freebies. The others are mostly a shade of their former glory.

I think this is coming back around... I have friends who are sick of the whole corp social media mess and are just... running their own sites again. Maybe not for SL, but I'm certainly seeing a lot more of it in the world. I've got more RSS feeds from self-hosted blogs in my reader now than I did just a few years ago. I personally love that this is an independent forum...

I think promotion in SL would be great, a group and a location and maybe occasional notices about new features/exciting threads in the forum would get people looking

 

[Soen Eber]

Dropbox

www.dropbox.com

Sorta made it work with Dropbox. I suspect with my flickr account being hours old, there are spam-related restrictions on the account meaning I can't share properly.

 

[Noodles]

And given the fact that nowadays there are far more image hosting sites around than 15 years ago, it is probably not worth the pain to revive it without the archive.

So many of those try DESPERATELY to prevent hotlinking though. It's somhard to get a raw image URL and often they just redirect to a page hosting the image. Plus all the social aspects.

 

[Noodles]

I think this is coming back around... I have friends who are sick of the whole corp social media mess and are just... running their own sites again. Maybe not for SL, but I'm certainly seeing a lot more of it in the world. I've got more RSS feeds from self-hosted blogs in my reader now than I did just a few years ago. I personally love that this is an independent forum...

I wish it would. I still use RSS (FreshRSS hosted locally) and I love personal blogs in general.

This year I started cleaning out my old Facebook posts by visiting the memories page each day, and one thing I noticed was just how little I have posted there. 90% of what I am deleting are from Friend feed posts that no longer exists, or Foursquare check-ins.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

I think this is coming back around... I have friends who are sick of the whole corp social media mess and are just... running their own sites again. Maybe not for SL, but I'm certainly seeing a lot more of it in the world. I've got more RSS feeds from self-hosted blogs in my reader now than I did just a few years ago. I personally love that this is an independent forum...

Well creating alternatives to big tech co sites is quite old. Does anybody remember Diaspora here, which was hailed back then in 2010 as Facebook competitor by some when it was new? No? See, that's the problem with it: people are lazy, and most won't switch. And a big problem with Diaspora was there programming language of choice as well, since it was all the hype back in these days: Ruby on Rails. A nightmare of Lovecraftian dimensions.

If you don't remember RoR: it runs Twitter (or did at least in the past), Github and other stuff.

Anyway, people go where the biggest dumpling of content is. This is why they are so lazy, despite always complaining about it, to leave Flickr. This is why Opensim never took off. And so on...

I really would like to see a new spring for this technology, but it's hard to achieve. Even worse is GenZ, which doesn't know what email really is and prefers to live in Whatsapp and other stuff.

 

[Khamon]

So many of those try DESPERATELY to prevent hotlinking though. It's somhard to get a raw image URL and often they just redirect to a page hosting the image. Plus all the social aspects.

Flickr will share BBCODE that includes linking to your entire photo stream but you can paste that here, then delete everything that isn't between the image tags. That will post the image only. You will have removed the extraneous linking.

I think this is coming back around... I have friends who are sick of the whole corp social media mess and are just... running their own sites again. Maybe not for SL, but I'm certainly seeing a lot more of it in the world. I've got more RSS feeds from self-hosted blogs in my reader now than I did just a few years ago. I personally love that this is an independent forum...

I think promotion in SL would be great, a group and a location and maybe occasional notices about new features/exciting threads in the forum would get people looking

<<< is one of those people. Scrolling through social media has become a useless, almost robotic, function. One has to look at groups, or individual friends, to scroll through an effective feed. Even then the unrelated ads, time-sucking reals, useless suggestions, and people you probably don't know fill nearly every other post. This forum is a refreshing difference. Discord and Messenger are effective as well but they're too streaming for me to follow easily although search is effective for archival reckoning.

Well creating alternatives to big tech co sites is quite old...I really would like to see a new spring for this technology, but it's hard to achieve. Even worse is GenZ, which doesn't know what email really is and prefers to live in Whatsapp and other stuff.

The effort here is to support a community. We aren't looking for mainstream adoption of the next global chat mechanism. Forum BBS is still a reasonably good tool for a defined group to use.

Addressing the OP, you know how we all love to complete surveys, but I believe we may have some common interests, hobbies, pursuits that warrant a forum that we can use to recruit like minded to join. Then they'll be exposed to the entirety of VVO and may choose to assimilate themselves into the serpent hive. Is there any provision for a group of users to create and moderate their own forum, dare I say Reddit style, so that you don't have to provide all of the support for niche fora? It will, of course, require some oversight, trust, and much organizational discussion.

edit: replaced embedded BBCODE with text