Exodus from InWorldz As Diehard Remainers Promise New World

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

InWorldz II is now being actively worked on and those close to Beth Reischl are fully behind the move now the GoFundMe appeal has been stopped after fierce accusations of bad dealing and bait and switch tactics which some claim amounts to fraud. The community is hopelessly split between those that have faith in Reischl and those that have had enough. There is already an exodus from InWorldz under way where residents and merchants are frantically packaging up all they can before the servers shutdown today, Friday 27th. They are moving onto other grids in sizable numbers so I am being told. Meanwhile, the tech-heads among the Remainers are busy setting up new servers and migrating data across including avatar registrations, groups and filtered inventory for those not objecting to the transfer of content to the new grid.

No date has been mentioned for InWorldz II to open but it will probably be several weeks given the amount of work to do. When it does open some may well return so for some of the departing refugees it might be a two-way tip - hard to say really. But there is a lot of bad feeling and people feel put out losing stuff and having to move anyway. The longer it takes to rebuild will also play a part in determining how many will return. But there is plenty of places to go anyway and some grids are already welcoming the new comers and doing all they can to help them.

In a comment on Hypergrid Business, Rene said "We are receiving a goodly influx of IW immigrants in DiscoveryGrid - Most of the IW people coming here marvel at Hypergrid and the ability to traverse the greater Metaverse. I'm sure other grids are receiving IW people, so lets help out the people who chose to move onto OpenSim, show them the places to get started, explain large regions, good crossings, and more. Let's get the welcome wagons happening."

One of several DigiWorldz promotional images for affiliates.

This made me wonder if any of the bigger commercial grids like Kitely Virtual and DigiWorldz were seeing a similar influx so I sent an email to Terry (Butch Arnold) of DigiWorldz asking and he replied, "We have received many new InWorldz users over the past few days. We've added approx. 150 new users to our system since 7/24/2018 and we've also added approx. 42 new regions in that same period." I was quite surprised by the numbers but it may well reflect the extent of the bad feeling amongst IW refugees. Anyway, I also asked Ilan Tochner at Kitely grid, which is well known for it's unique cloud-based worlds on demand, to see if they were experiencing a similar influx.

Ilan Tochner replied, "We've seen a significant number of people migrate into Kitely as a result of Inworldz's pending shutdown. Many of them have been ordering new Kitely worlds and buying items from Kitely Market to start building up their new avatar's inventories. We've also seen an increased number of content creators opening new Kitely Market stores."

Welcome to Kitely Virtual

Opensim code has come on leaps and bounds in recent years and there is a lot more security offered. Kitely has added code of their own too such as proprietary cloud-based Inventory and Asset systems that work significantly better than the ones that come with OpenSim and backup content to multiple datacenters across the world to prevent data loss.  Ilan told me, "Kitely has been open to business since March 2011 and offers 16-region sized private estates (VarRegions) that allow for up to 120,000 prims and 80 avatars for just $39.95/month. We've implemented export controls to protect content creators creations while at the same time enabling people to easily export their worlds to filtered OAR files on-demand." See: https://www.kitely.com/virtual-world-news/2013/06/12/export-permission-implemented/ "I think it's important," Tochner said, "for people searching for a new virtual home to consider the stability and performance of the grid they select for storing their avatar and their land. Almost all OpenSim grids worth visiting are now open to the Hypergrid thus making it less important to select the same provider as your friends as you'll be able to use the Hypergrid to visit them no matter what grid they have chosen themselves."

I asked Terry how he felt about the situation with InWorldz and what he could do for the refugees. He said "It's a sad situation when any grid closes, but especially one with the reputation and history Inworldz has. We are pleased many of the Inworldz users have chosen to try DigiWorldz and we welcome them with open arms. We'll work hard to make sure their experience in DigiWorldz is the best it can be and by all means, we'll continue our tradition of doing whatever we can to help protect the rights of not only our residents/creators, but any resident in any grid."

Kitely Market online & can deliver to any grid!

Kitely also has a very popular Market Place. Here is what Ilan Tochner said of it, "One thing that is important to keep in mind is that if someone wishes to sell in Kitely Market they'll need to have a Kitely avatar to be able to do so as items are added to Kitely Market product listings via direct access to the uploading avatar's inventory and that only works with Kitely avatars. Kitely avatars are also the only ones that get direct deliveries of their Kitely Market purchases into their inventories. Avatars on other grids need to use our Hypergrid delivery system which is less robust." 

See:https://kitely.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/doc/pages/6914050/Kitely+Market+Delivery+to+Other+Grids .

There are other options too depending on one's desire to do business or settle into one of the community grids such as OSgrid and Metropolis. These grids are well known for their share and share alike culture which others say amounts to tolerance of copybotting and even Communism! It is true they don't have grid currency either but not everyone on those grids thinks or behaves like a Marxist and some do run businesses and sell products for Gloebits which is a universal currency and given that people connect their own instances to the grids they can indeed set up a currency like Gloebit on the server running their simulator. It only takes a viewer with Gloebit enabled to spend money in enabled regions.

Upgrade your viewer for an improved commerce experience.

Outworldz Dreamworld

Anyone can set up an Opensim instance at home or on a VPS server. It is less complicated than setting up Halcyon even. In fact, the Outworldz DreamWorld is a free, pre-packaged Windows-compatible virtual reality Opensimulator system that is easy to install, easy to run, and powerful. It is free and open source. 

You can download it from https://www.outworldz.com/outworldz_installer/

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