I second all of this motion! Flickr, facebook and other forums have become increasingly hostile to the use case of people expressing themselves virtually -showcasing avatars, showcasing builds, etc for reasons that are both understandable (fraud of various kinds) and not so much. It would be better if this platform was updated to 2020's standards and sharing features (sharing posts, reblogging to twitter, facebook, etc) were added on. This would have the benefit of promoting SL as well as enhancing our SL experience.

Oh YES!

I enthusiastically support this feature request! Actually, I was trying to add a similar feature request — when I noticed this one was already posted being tracked!

First and foremost: aye, it's a big task, as Absinthe Rumrunner so well put it. But consider what is currently going on...

knows that my.secondlife.com still exists (or, for some, that it ever existed). It's incredibly underpromoted, even though it's part of everybody's profile! Residents just don't quite understand how things magically appear there, and why some residents apparently have a lot of posts there while most have... none at all (with the occasional info about display name changes).

The thing is... people cannot be in-world but still want to keep in touch, for various reasons. Being logged in might not be feasible on the workplace — or on mobile. Instead, Web-based tools, and those with native apps, are a preferred way of staying in touch.

At some stage, it was Twitter, then Facebook (as each platform launched more and more features). For a long while, it was Plurk. There was always this question: how to keep in touch with the rest of your SL friends, if neither of you were able to quickly drop in-world?

All social platforms share images (and, well, these days, video). We do that with in-world textures & snapshots, but that has two issues: the first, of course, is that it's not free (cheap, but not free). The second is that pictures of SL also comprise part of its promotion. For eons we have grumbled about mainstream media which only gets a few snapshots from 2006 or 2009 and presents them as if they were "recent" pictures of the "20-years-old" Second Life — when they have stunning imagery on Flickr, taken by awesome, talented photographers — which get overseen, just because, well, Flickr lost its momentum. Or simply perhaps because mainstream media is not aware that Flickr is still around, either.

my.secondlife.com allowed — still does, in fact — easy sharing of pictures on one's timeline. Sadly, however, that's all it does with the snapshots. You cannot easily group them together inside albums or similar grouping (e.g. using tags). The images are stored with reasonable quality, for free, and essentially forever, but... once uploaded, it's hard to find them.

It also has lots of incredibly promising features, some of which clearly were never fully developed. First and foremost, if you have an account on SL, it's on my.secondlife.com as well — no need to register, and your friends know that it's that are there, not an impostor grabbing your name. You can, to a degree, communicate with people in-world (I admit I'm a bit rusty and can't seem to remember exactly what works and what doesn't). It would be the place to store received IMs if you're not in-world — but apparently that feature was never fully developed.

Also, groups. Sure, you can take a peek at other people's groups, if they're being listed on their profiles. But what about a group timeline? Sync'ed to the in-world group chat? A place where you can see (and post!) group notices? And, of course, what about a common, shared pool of pictures?

People endlessly complain about the reduced number of in-world groups. There is a huge overhead in dealing with all the group-related, complex permission system, which affects — group participation, object ownership, land ownership, cost-splitting, and, of course, the fine-grained permissions that allow a group member to do X and not Y. All these are necessary; all these create a huge overhead, every time someone touches a prim or walks across a parcel border. But the vast majority of groups out there aren't even being used for any of that.

The largest groups (i.e. those with thousands of residents) are mostly "announcement" groups (or support groups for specific products, such as TPVs or in-world bots). They're a handy way of communicating with those thousands. People on the fashion event groups couldn't care less if they have permissions to change the media stream on an obscure parcel somewhere. They just want to know where they will receive the latest announcement.

You can still sign on for the SL Events and get some sort of advance warning when that event is due. But how many actually still use the SL Events that way? Instead, notecards with landmarks are attached to group notices, and the event hosts will (hopefully) post a few reminders when the time of the event is due. Which obviously will only reach whoever is online at the time. If you happen to log in one minute after the announcement, and are desperately digging through the notecards to find the correct landmark... you're out of luck. Whatever has been said on group chat is not available to .

Thus, whoever organises things in SL — not only fashion events, of course, but rather anything that requires a community, small or large — needs to go "beyond SL groups" to reach everybody. In the olden times, we managed mailing lists. In-world, we have Subscrib-O-Matic and equivalent systems that will replace the simple mechanism of announcing whatever is important to a large audience, without the risk of having it silently disappearing in the message void. There used to be "IM mailing lists" as well (causing a burden on the servers), which, however, would only be effective if everybody had the option to send IMs to email — which not everybody does, and, when they do, it's not 100% reliable.

So... residents had no other choice but to move out of the SL environment and seek for alternatives, as said before. The current trend, perhaps interestingly, is Discord. You may like it or not, but almost every SL community worth their name has set up a "Discord server", sometimes free to join, sometimes invitation-only. Discord has the advantage of being light-weight — because it was designed as a voice companion to fast-paced networked first-person-shooters, and players didn't want to sacrifice the tiniest slice of their latency just because they had access to voice channels. It is also possible to use develop 'bots for Discord that do all sorts of things (such as the Midjourney bot, which handles AI-generated images using stable diffusion). I admit it, I'm not an expert, but I have had an account there, well before it became popular as a "companion tool" to Second Life.

Discord, beyond the amazing voice and streaming abilities, is actually very basic. I suspect that they just put a HTML wrapper around IRC. Almost everything in Discord works like IRC — not only the commands, even the notion that each community has "a server". Sure, they could have done that on purpose to make things familiar to those die-hard IRC fanatics. Or they could have leveraged the ability of IRC to be incredibly light-weight and resilient, and easy to expand on demand.

Whatever the reason, it was clear that Discord's major effort, outside the streaming aspect, was simply to make it .

And that means... emojis. Stickers. Markdown comments. The ability to open several channels inside the same community, and assign different permission levels of access to moderation and management tools. Persistent communication (i.e., if you're off-line, you won't lose any messages). Integration with simple tools, such as calendars for reminders. And all the rest can simply be programmed with a bot — just as happens in IRC.

In other words — Discord has essentially everything that Second Life wanted to offer via my.secondlife.com, and everything even as it should, without glitches or surprises. And, of course, you can bring Discord with you on your mobile phone and stay in touch — or even use a text-based, command-line tool to access some of its IRC-like capabilities (well, technically these are not allowed, but they exist...).

Now we even start having direct requests here on the feedback portal for either more or less integration with Discord — that's how relevant it has become. Also, residents routinely post requests on Discord to vote up on features . That's how useful it is!

But all "external" tools suffer from a set of issues: you cannot "use" your avatar data to log in, for instance, which means others don't really know if "you" is "you". It's Just Another Account — which you happen to to be the same as in SL. By contrast, users are unique across all the SL websites.

You also cannot easily "share" things from SL to, say, Discord. Not even snapshots (unless you write your own bot for that). Obviously, you can save things to disk first and upload them to Discord. But both remain separate tools.

For instance, I'd love to have a "unified calendar" for SL — where I could add all events I'm interested in. Instead, I have a fragmented experience. One of my communities publishes its list on several different places: Google Calendar, in-world group notices, Discord events, and (I think) Facebook events. If I'm not subscribed to , I might miss something — but the truth is that I just have easy integration with Google Calendar (Discord and Facebook work as well — I haven't tried — but SL Events do . They're their own, hermetic, close, opaque system). Oh, and it's no coincidence that even the Linden Lab-sponsored community roundtable events are being announced on Google Calendar as well! That really doesn't make any sense to — SL already has an "events system", why doesn't it connect to anything at all?

So, am I requesting to transform my.secondlife.com into a Discord clone? No, obviously not. What I'm saying is that you really don't need to reinvent the wheel. There are of options out there which are public, open-source, and free — and many have their own team to maintain and keep current all the time. It doesn't make any sense to use anything you built yourselves in, uh, 2007 (?) and never managed to allocate any resources to it since then — because, well, we all know it's tough to keep those "minor" (but useful!) tools up-to-date.

That's why you should grab one of the many off-the-shelf solutions (there are many choices...) and just adapt it to integrate it in your systems. my.secondlife.com is "just a web page", but it's enhanced with two-way communication with the SL Grid. What you need to do is to replace it by "just another web page looking pretty much the same" and work to establish the two-way communication according to your tastes.

It is to abandon any attempt to do so and just replace my.secondlife.com with, well, Discord (or Slack, if you're willing to pay even more). But as other feature requests here already pointed out, there is an issue regarding private data, which would have to be "leaked" somehow to third parties, in order to connect accounts — or, at least, there might be the that such "leak" is possible, thus discouraging privacy-conscious residents (almost all of us, really) to join such a system.

Instead, do it the other way round: overhaul my.secondlife.com, give it the look & feel you want/need, but keep it under the auspices of Second Life's servers and its Terms of Service.

I wouldn't encourage you to do so if I didn't know that the bulk of the work can easily be done with third-party, open-source tools. It's more a question to "shop around" for the best solution: the one that has been around for long, with an established developer base, few pending issues, and constant updates. I'm sure you'll be successful in finding all the above in a single package. And then all your work should just be focused on the with the SL web services — good solutions will already have a rich collection of plugins/extensions (such as, say, Mattermost, the MIT-licensed, open-source Slack-like killer application which integrates with and has been tested in real environments — has paid tech support if you really need it).

Also, if possible, look for anything that has already implemented ActivityPub. It might currently be the best attempt at creating a new, modern social communications protocol — replacing former open Internet protocols such as IRC and Jabber/XMPP, and allowing things such as federation. ActivityPub is not perfect, and not as "standard" as the Mastodon crowd claims, but it's a start — and there are plenty of examples of trying to use it to experimentally bridge across platforms and technologies. The main point is just to make everything future-proof, by sticking to open and well-documented communication protocols...

This is becoming increasingly important as platforms like flickr harden their rules and delete many -paying- secondlife users everyday.

Something in-house would besafer, easier and great for SL users.

I urge the dev team to work on it. It could solve issues of thousands of people.

With all of the social media platforms bieng subject to Internet enshitification... My.Secondlife getting an overhaul to become it's own second life centric, modern, and good social platform would be beyond lovely.

As it is with social media, twitter locking people out without an account, flickr censoring and charging creators to show their products. An integrated SL Social Media would do well. We do so much outside SL now, compared to when it was released. Allowing shops to advertise and post media in a way people could view in and out of SL would be great. It could be integrated to work as part of the upcoming app as part of the text viewer side of it even.

One of the things I really like(d) about my.secondlife.com was the "Interests" mechanic. For years we'd had some rudimentary interest options on the inworld profile, and having the ability to self-create our own interests that others might share, was really quite a fun exercise.

One thing I really enjoyed was looking up an existing interest, and seeing what other folks that shared that interest, also listed as an interest. It was really fun in terms of building the skeleton of a profile to appeal to certain interest groups, to flesh it out later with more full writing.

This feature hasn't worked reliably since the "Message" feature was removed (likely due to abuse/spam).

I think there are still features of my.secondlife.com that could be quite valuable, and even expanded upon, and it's a shame that it's been left to languish for so long. I hope 'tracked/accepted' means there's still hope for renewal.

I think this is a huge untapped area where LL could do a lot to keep people in the viewer and interacting. A huge section of SL community has been lost to Discord and other social tools because we don't have a good way to share text and photos and other things directly from the viewer. Groups, people, photos and all sorts of areas of SL would really benefit from making this a real feature available inside the viewer.

Sites like Avatarbook provide a prime example of what a good social media platform for SL would be like - Group pages, events, things like that would be perfect.

my.secondlife was initially related to LL's purchase and closure of avatars united (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avatars_United). It has not seen attention since the initial release .. perhaps because that initial release was underwhelming and got little engagement.

SL desperately needs updated & modernized social tooling, of which my.secondlife is a small part.