Found an interesting article on The Atlantic about the abandonment of digital worlds and the impact of such on their inhabitants and future digital travelers. It’s something I’ve thought about quite a bit myself as I spent several years with a group of miscreants wandering around Second Life causing havoc, but also holding interesting conversations, and at one point, dedicating an entire island to clever Rube Goldberg machines exploiting the in-game physics.

This actually led to my first real developer jobs, building and scripting a virtual city block in Second Life for one, and creating and populating another in Open Simulator. (My first experience as an admittedly very limited sysadmin.)

Logging back into Second Life years later was kind of melancholy, as most of the mainland is abandoned, with the remaining users scattered into private islands where they can filter their interactions with those of the outgroup. It had lost nearly all the charm and frenzy of a world that was the next big thing, and populated by a huge swath of people from furries to university deans looking to get their institution a virtual foothold in this emerging technology.

On the other hand, at least it still exists. As Jason Scott is quoted in the article,

“The great paradox about these digital communities is that they’re easily kept around forever, and they are even more easily deleted utterly”

So many bits of my early Internet days, from the HotBot search engine I swore by to the very first written-in-notepad Geocities web page I made are lost to the sands of time or to merger & absorption by other companies. It’s good to see digital archivists like Jason Scott taking the time to step back and realize that these seemingly ephemeral parts of the early Internet are worth hanging on to, and like historical buildings provide context and character to the surrounding and advancing digital landscape.