On Tuesday June 24th, the SL22B Meet the Lindens sessions continued with the product and operations teams. This was a pre-recorded session. Though Bret and Kyle Linden were on hand in person and answered a couple of additional queries following the viewing of the recording.

As usual, when I report on these sessions I make an effort to be accurate. But, I do paraphrase and summarize for clarity and length. If I’ve changed the sense of a question or response by doing so, that’s my fault entirely. If you see something here that’s super important to you, you can always go to the video for the full details. I include time stamped links as I go.

Attending

• Bret & Kyle Linden were on stage in person.
• Kali Linden, Director of Engineering for Web and Platform, pre-recorded
• Grumpity Linden, Senior Vice President of Product and Engineering, pre-recorded

Introductions

• Bret started things out by asking Grumpity and Kali to introduce themselves.
  • Grumpity noted that she started as a contractor in 2009 and started as a full-time Linden in 2014. Over the years she’s marveled at how Second Life has grown, changed, and evolved. Apparently enjoying her job, she noted “It’s super fun to be here!”
  • Kali has been with Linden Lab for about ten years, the last five or so with SL. She’s been working to modernize the technology stack for the platform.
• Bret: What has been a highlight over the past year?
  • Grumpity: The shift in LL to work more closely with the creator community has been exciting. Also, attending the GDC Expo.
  • Kali: Working with the creators and meeting residents and first time users at GDC. “The energy of talking to our users is really infectious.”
• Bret: What do you work together on?
  • Grumpity: Account security is one area. It’s an ongoing area of work.
  • Kali: Marketplace, web search, events, auctions, Linden Homes, region purchases, transaction security and accuracy, AWS maintenance and cost efficiency, support tooling, asset delivery and storage, all of the stuff that keep your inventories going. [That’s a long list!]
  • Grumpity: A lot of this work is not publicly visible. E.g., adding tooling to support customer success.
  • One area of close collaboration was to define the Premium Plus membership tier.

Marketplace

At just about seven minutes in, Bret asked for an update on Marketplace.

• Kali: We’re working on making MP more mobile friendly. Your device should not be a barrier. Making sure it works on the in-viewer browser in a small window while you remain engaged with inworld activities is important too. You should be able to shop while remaining active with the SL world.

What about merchants?

• Kali: we would like to integrate Caspervend into MP. You should be able to maintain your MP and CV inventories in one place. That’s a goal. CV has awesome tools that MP does not. She would like to bring them over and expand on them. Getting more and better data to merchants is also a focus.
  And yes, they’ve heard the comments about MP search. It’s also an area of work. Getting the balance right to show new products without burying old gems is the trick.

SL Web

The next topic was SL Web.

• Kali: SL Web should be an extension of your SL. A web based way to view and manage your inventory, a calendar, these are parts of a long term vision. You should be able to manage groups, friends, sort and tag inventory, all while relaxing in front of the TV. You shouldn’t need to full viewer to do these simple tasks. These sorts of quality of life enhancements are what she thinks about all the time.
  A maturity filter for events is another goal. Just about everyplace else in SL has a maturity filter. The events list should too.

How to Share the Magic of SL?

Just short of the seven minute mark, things went in a different, less technical direction, Bret next passed on the question “How can residents share the magic of SL?”

• Kali: Being able to gift premium membership is one thought. Providing tools for venue owners and content creators to promote their offerings is another. Rewards for friends joining maybe? Just making SL more connected will help share the magic.

Mobile App

At 7:43, we entered a slightly bigger topic, the mobile viewer. Where are we now? Where are we going?

• Grumpity: admits that she loves talking about the mobile app. It’s easy to get caught up in the day to day work and lose sight of how much they’ve accomplished with it so far. It remains difficult to render all SL avatars on a phone. But, they are making huge strides on that front.
• Grumpity: A tree year vision: Permit existing users to “stay in touch” with SL without having to be at their desktops. At the same time, those things are not enough for a new user. How do we make mobile a meaningful onboarding platform? Mobile is a different set of features. We need to identify the key ones.
• Grumpity: One goal is to be able to log in on mobile, see all of your messages, keep chatting and IMing [a sort of parallel login?] when you have to step away from the desktop for any reason. Persistence of chat between mobile and desktop is also a topic of interest.
• Bret: How do you gather feedback and suggestions?
  Grumpity: Suggestions can go to the feedback portal. There are also monthly user groups. They also occasionally hang about the new user starting locations as some are arriving via the mobile app.

Viewer, Server, and General Performance

Given the performance rollercoaster of the past year, it’s unsurprising that eventually – at 17:50 – talk turned to performance. Noting that both have been working closely with Signal Linden, Bret asked about the state of the viewer.

• Grumpity: The last six months or so, have been a concerted effort to improve the performance of the viewer. There have been significant gains, which sadly came after the big hit earlier. Different platforms and chipsets are being worked. Crash logs are being examined. A variety of quality of life issues are being looked at as well. The viewer should be your window into the Second Life world. The less you have to think about it, the better.
• Grumpity: some close work with the Firestorm team has also been going on. The most recent release should show some results from that collaboration.

What’s going on with glTF Import?

• Grumpity: it’s moving forward. They are working on making it as straightforward as possible. They’re seeking more engagement from creators. So, check out the relevant project viewer. Provide feedback to help stabilize the product.

WebRTC Voice Support

At 21:39, Bret asked about the status of WebRTC Voice support.

• Grumpity: Work on WebRTC has been on pause while the focus has been on performance. Recently, work on WebRTC has picked back up. It’s likely that WebRTC Voice will be available across the grid by late summer. The change should be seamless. Everybody should be able to have a WebRTC Voice capable viewer. The quality of voice is better. The possibilities for future development are practically endless.
  Moderation tools will be the first post-rollout focus. Land owners will be able to set rules and perform moderation.
  Next, there are a number of ideas for ways to move this feature forward. Phillip has much input into this process. Phillip’s vision includes integrating instant AI translation for voice communications. Voice to text and text to speech could also greatly expand accessibility.
  There’s a bright future for WebRTC Voice. It’s definitely coming. Apologies for the delay.

More for Premium Subscriptions?

Just past 25 minutes in, Bret asked if there is more coming for premium subscriptions.

• Grumpity: We were hoping to be in a position to announce something at SLB, but things are taking a bit longer. There is some thought as to how to make Premium Plus benefits accessible to a broader population. For creators, maybe a stipend free subscription level. (Creators make L$ from their products. Many of them don’t really need a stipend.) The ability to pay subscription fees with L$ is another idea. This might also be of interest to content creators.

At that point, the recorded session wrapped up. There were a couple of questions addressed by Kyle Linden at the live viewing of the pre-recorded session.

• Will RLVa become part of the “standard” viewer?
  • Kyle: That is on the roadmap, but there is no timeline.
• Fall animations and hit boxes have not changed in a long time. Anything coming?
  • Kyle: These are items of interest, but they have to compete for priority.

And that wrapped up Tuesday at the Astral Athenaeum. As with yesterday’s session, this one was very well attended. The audience regions were at or near capacity. (I had to keep my draw distance low and view focused just on the speakers to keep my 12+ year old desktop’s memory from running out!)

The schedule calls for Phillip Linden to host tomorrow’s session. I will go out on a limb here and predict that it will also be quite popular.

Of the many high points of the Second Life Birthday celebrations, the Meet the Lindens sessions are near the top of the list. On Monday June 23rd, Linden Lab Product Operations team members gathered at the Astral Athenaeum to meet with Second Life residents.

For about an hour and a half, the group fielded questions both submitted in advance and asked by the audience during the event. The complete live session has been posted to YouTube. Below are the significant points as they occurred to me while I attended.

My standard disclaimer: the summary below is as accurate as my attendance, notes, and review of the recorded session can make it. Still, I’ve paraphrased and synopsized both questions and responses. It’s always possible I’ve messed that up somewhere along the line. If so, that’s entirely my fault and nobody’s from the event.

Attending

• Squeaky Mole (Organizer)
• Missy Mole (Host)
• Patch Linden (Senior Vice President Product Operations, Customer Support, Trust & Safety)
• Keira Linden (Manager Customer Success and Trust & Safety)
• Izzy Linden (Creative Producer)

Missy hosted the session, pulling out pre-submitted questions for the team to answer along with (later) questions that were submitted during the event or pulled from chat. She did her best to group the questions into broad topics.

Land & Homes

The first area of interest, starting about the 4:20 mark, concerned land and homes issues.

• Patch was asked about forthcoming Linden Homes themes.
  [This is quite understandable as SLB has traditionally been a place and time where new themes have been revealed. A few years back, almost half an SLB region was set aside to show off several new themes. Things are quieter on the home front this year.]
  • Patch: Big question! There’s a lot in the works.
  • He teased the title, for the next theme, which will be for Premium Plus members: Ridgewood Enclave.
  • An exciting difference with this theme is that it is intended to eventually include commercial sites as well as the residential parcels that have made up all of the previous Linden Home themes.
• Can homestead regions be made more accessible? Perhaps discounted for Premium Plus members? They might then see more use as truly private areas or commercial demonstration venues.
  • Patch: does not see additional discounts coming anytime soon. However, remember that you can pay for regions using L$. That can sometimes give you a price advantage.
• How about larger regions? Greater size in square meters? More land impact? Some regions have been seen supporting LI of 45K. Double-primmed regions for all?
  • Patch: this question comes up often. Balancing performance and asset load is the trick. There are even experimental 80K prim regions. This topic does get consideration, maybe in the not too distant future.
  • Nothing was said about physically larger regions. [From what I understand, the 256m x 256m size is baked into SL’s architecture at a pretty basic level. I would not begin holding my breath for more square meters just now.]
• Would it be possible for SL to offer more server options? Every region request needs to be a ticket. More autonomy for region owners?
  • Patch: we’re always looking for better ways to offer self-services. (E.g., self-initiated region restarts.)
  • Looking at some other things like region rename and so on.
  • For server options, there are offerings such as Event-Pro and Event-Elite regions. These have beefier AWS instances behind the scenes.
• Why does the sun rise and set backwards in the Thousand Islands section of Bellisseria?
  • Izzy: intentionally reversed day-night cycle? No, not really. The fix is in the works.
• Will all Premium Plus Linden Homes themes be back fitted with PBR? How about a Premium Plus version of season landscaping?
  • Patch: everything new is being brought out with PBR and fallback textures.
• Is there any possibility of a themed/covenanted section of the mainland?
  • Patch: Belli?
  • Mainland is, and is intended to be, wide open.
  • Something in between? Maybe rely on private estates to fill this niche.
  • It’s an idea to consider, but it isn’t top of mind.
• Game of Homes
  [This term was new to both Missy and myself. It refers to sequentially obtaining and abandoning Linden Homes in a quest to find one that’s just right according to the resident’s own criteria.]
  The questioner suggested it would be simpler if you don’t keep being offered the same home sometimes.
  • Patch: the five choices per day limit is to protect the systems from being overloaded with requests.
  • Maybe if the system that doles out Linden Homes is revisited, this feature can be examined.
  • In the meantime, there is a one-a-day reset of the request count you can ask support to give you if you keep getting repeats.
• Is there a way to obtain a specific Linden Home?
  • Patch: Yes! Be Premium Plus.
    (And it helps when Premium Plus members include a 2^nd choice in their request.)

Adult

Almost 29 minutes in, the topic turned to adult content.

• If you travel along any mainland road, you will quickly encounter adult content. What can be done?
  • Keira: People will place inappropriate content. Mainland is huge and LL can’t see it all. They rely on resident reports.
  • While there are many complaints about abuse requests being ignored, it’s also possible that the residents submitting the reports have a different interpretation of the rules than do LL.
• If someone files an abuse report, is their name connected with it?
  • Keira: No.
  • If people are being harassed, they will not be identified to the subject of an AR.

Customer Success

Just a few minutes were spent on questions about adult content. At 32:15, the topic changed to Customer Success (formerly known as support).

• Is the idea of hiring remote staff for tech support being considered?
  • Patch: the teams operate out of different areas. Some teams are regional, some hybrid. Whether somebody can be hired for a particular team can depend on where they are.
• Support tickets have been slow. Is that going to get better?
  • Patch: support teams were reorganized last year. There were unintended consequences, e.g., a backlog. Now, some case types have gone up to months long solution times. This is not the situation LL wants.
    They have been hiring new staff and finishing the reorganization. They’re almost done. The team is larger by about ten staff than before the change. New staff have been trained and brought up to speed. Progress has been made.
  • Keira: is very aware of the problems. They are working their way back to the SLAs prior to the reorganization. The backlog has been cut roughly in half from its peak. (Down from around 7,500 to roughly 3,250.)
    News: Weekend support returning on the weekend following the session. [As of writing, weekend support should already have been available for some weeks.]
• A creator changed her legal name. It took four months to resolve this with Tillia. There were several missteps.
  • Keira: working on smoothing this out. With two organizations, Linden Lab and Tillia now Thunes, confusion can occur. Always start by contacting the Customer Success team for SL first.
• If somebody’s account is placed on hold, should they expect to see some information about that?
  • Keira: Yes. They should get an email to the address of record for the account. That should include all the relevant information. All too often, it’s in the SPAM folder.
• Copybotters, the account gets banned, new account, aaaand they’re back.
  • Copybotting is a serious issue that LL look at very closely. The quicker, and more detailed the AR, the better. They need tickets to be able to act. They must come from the creator. Include dates and links to where you’ve seen the copied content. Note that you may be asked to fill out a DMCA report.
• Where would a creator who has been copybotted find this information?
  • Keira: submit a ticket with as much information as you can. There are wiki pages on DMCA submission. (https://community.secondlife.com/news/tools-and-technology/online-dmca-complaint-submission-r37/)
  • The Customer Success team really want to hear about these problems. They want to protect residents’ intellectual property.
• Malicious messages and scam links
  • Keira: there are a lot of those lately. Keep your account details private! Be cautious with links. Ignore free L$. She can’t go into details, but they are looking into ways to limit this sort of message traffic.
  • A new Trust & Safety office hour may be added in the coming months.
• Why was voice chat taken out of info hubs?
  • Keira: that was definitely a difficult decision. They had to look at many angles. Too many people were abusing the feature at info hubs; using voice chat to harass and spam new residents. They may be able to open it back up in the future. Care will have to be taken that it cause more good than harm.

Events

The next subject, starting at around the 54:48 mark, is events. In specific, the Shop n’ Hop events.

• Is Shop n’ Hop going too far when it competes with user created shopping events, which can’t really compete?
  • Patch: we do try to take into account how a Linden Lab event might impact resident hosted events. This is really the first time he’s heard about any sort of conflict. Most creator driven events are more tightly themed; genera, body type, role play community etc.
    They’re open to feedback, but thus far it has not been much of an issue.
  • Missy The whole point of the Shop n’ Hop is that there’s no push on specific brand content.
• Shop n’ Hop: More stores? Enough space for all applicants?
  • Missy: It’s a lottery. Applications are not accepted in order. Applying in the first minute applications open will not give you an advantage. Review of applications does not happen until after the application period has closed.
  • Patch: Missy, how many apply? Missy: 800 plus.
  • How many shops? 480 (that’s 400 general and 80 adult shopping regions).

Payment and Billing

A little more than an hour in, talk turned to payment and billing issues.

• Not everybody has PayPal. Will other payment methods be supported? Google Pay maybe?
  • Keira: we are a global community. Payment flexibility is important. Thunes is looking at more payment options. It’s unknown if Google Pay is on their radar, but she can bring it up with them. As new payment methods become available, they will be announced.
• Any option to pre-pay land tier (in case of vacation, weather, hospitalization)?
  • Keira: this has come up. It’s not possible now. A number of software changes would be required. The best thing would be to submit the idea in the feedback portal.

Audience Questions

For the last twenty minutes or so, Missy began going through questions submitted during the event or pulled from chat. Naturally, these represent a mixed bag of topics.

• Legacy Name Changes, they’re expensive, and they allow people to know the old name. Is it possible to change it to a completely anonymous process?
  • Patch: this was a big point of decision when name changes were enabled in the first place. There was a lot of concern around using a name change to hide from bad past actions. It’s a safety feature.
• Will there be a lifetime Premium/Premium Plus membership offer during SL22B?
  • Patch: Not this time. Look for such things at charity events in the future.
• Premium Plus homes with season change?
  • Patch: This has to be done from the ground up. There may be other Linden Home themes with seasons. More to come. An API for season changes so that other content creators can play? They’re working on it.
• Are Linden staff going to be visiting folks on the grid?
  • Patch: Yes, nothing is stopping them now. We can do more!
• Why do you keep making new themes before completing old ones? It devalues old themes and delays their completion.
  • Izzy: The question is wide of the mark. No theme is ever ‘complete’. There may be an initial map, but it’s an ongoing process. A large area may be planned, but only five regions initially released. As demand sustains, more will be built. Putting fifty regions out would be inefficient. People want more themes. People in SL have highly varied interests. Focusing exclusively on one new theme without coming out with new ones would not serve the broad interests of the whole community.
• Is the giant dragon cave to be saved from the cleanup of old Linden Homes regions? It would be very nice to keep Cape Ekim.
  • Izzy: can’t offer 100% guarantee of anything, but Cape Ekim is taken very seriously. It is definitely a concern in the planning process.
  • Patch: has news, Cape Ekim will be converted to a special area to pay tribute to the history of that era of Linden Homes.
• Is it possible for support (live chat) to be available in the evening?
  • Keira: hours might change in the future. [though it did not sound to me like an immediate plan.]
• Translation via AI? Text? Voice?
  • This would be a great question for the product team!

With that, already having run over the scheduled time by some minutes, Missy wrapped up the session and we all went our separate ways; me to go someplace quiet and take the pressure of my poor box’s memory!