I’m at this impasse with my Second Life store, and I just can’t make a decision. If you’ve read my blog at all over the past year or more, even, you already know I’ve shut it down, and then opened it again, and then shut it down, and then opened it again. A lot of my indecision comes from this feeling, like, I started this thing in 2015, and removing its presence from within the world itself, along with quite possibly my own presence, feels like giving up, or a failure.
I’m not one who accepts failure.
And, for all intents and purposes, my store hasn’t failed. It’s made consistent sales, every single month, for the past ten years. It’s not hundreds or thousands of dollars, but it’s sales.
The problem, is that Linden Labs is about the only company charging exuberant amounts of money to “own” pieces of land so that you can put your stuff down. We’re talking, twelve bucks a month for a tiny piece of land that’s good for a box with some furniture to pretend you have an apartment, and upwards of twenty, to forty, to sixty, to eighty, and into the hundreds of dollars per month to have real space. And all of this exists on separate servers, all linked together in the virtual world.
If you’re going to run a store, and you want to have it in-world, you either need to pay Linden Labs for at least some space that’s larger than the tiny bit you get for a subscription, or rent your land from one of the barons who control most of the land in Second Life. The latter is the more expensive option, even if they’re both expensive options.
Compare this all to, say, renting a server for Minecraft, which can be as low as just five dollars. And Minecraft is almost essentially the same idea. You can build stuff. You can plop things down. And you can invite your friends and be social!
Hell, this entire website is running on a six dollar server. My Akkoma instance is running on an eighteen dollar server. That “Discover the Fediverse” app I made? Running on a six dollar server.
All of that combined, for less than it costs to have a single swatch of land in Second Life to have an actual physical place people can come to and browse my creations.
Now, this is only really half of the issue. I’d be more than willing to keep paying Linden Labs without question, far into the future, as long as I still have a job … if Second Life itself hadn’t become a desolate wasteland of thousands of people who don’t talk to anyone anymore.
It’s as bad as dating apps: I message someone, we talk for a bit, sometimes we click, sometimes we don’t. Either way, neither of us ever speak to each other ever again. You go to dance clubs to hear a DJ’s set, and everyone stands around AFK or talking in direct messages. You go to roleplay sims and nobody wants to roleplay with anyone but their cliques and in-groups. You go to the “safe hubs” where people land whenever their regions go offline, and you’ve got five people in child avatars who’ve somehow avoided being banned, a bunch of trolls running around abusing avatar push mechanics, and seventeen vampires drinking your blood.
It’s just not fun anymore.
There doesn’t seem to be any fun to have.
And Phillip Linden is dead-set on finding a way to squeeze AI into Second Life.
But, am I to blame? Am I the one who’s just not sociable anymore? Or, is it the increasingly isolated world we live in that’s causing all of this?
Either way, I’m not sure which road to take here. Keep the store’s location running, keep paying Linden Lab, or, take it down, relegate my time in Second Life to a memory, and move on with my creativity to something new. What do you think?
Source: https://mkultra.monster/secondlife/2025 ... e-i-dunno/
