The End of an Era: Why OSgrid is Shutting Down After 19 Years
For 19 years, OSgrid has been more than just a server or a platform. It was a digital frontier built on a radical premise: that an open, decentralized metaverse could thrive entirely on community, trust, and shared architecture. Today, it is with a profound sense of loss that the OSgrid board must announce the end of this journey. We are officially calling it a day.
This grid wasn’t defeated by time, nor by a lack of dedication from the team that has pulled this cart for the past decade. It was systematically broken by a malicious actor who weaponized our core philosophy against us. By exploiting the very freedom that defined us—our open code framework—they unleashed an iar process that flooded our architecture with massive, randomized, undeduplicable data. The technical reality is irreversible. In less than a year, our historically built asset server ballooned from 5 TB to 17 TB (80% of which is now junk). Our inventoryitems table exploded from 3 GB to a crippling 139 GB, turning routine 10-minute database backups into 12-hour ordeals. Our assets are effectively poisoned.
We were faced with a definitive choice. The only way to stop these attacks and secure the database would be to close our infrastructure and transition to a closed, commercial model. That move would completely erase the open ethos this grid was originally built upon. None of our technical staff are willing to operate a commercialized, walled garden. It’s simply not what anyone signed up for. The fee system proposed at the last meeting was a step toward combating this more efficiently, but to truly end the attacks, we would simply have to permanently lock down the grid. We refuse to compromise the very soul & model of OSgrid just to keep the lights on. Spending 11 hours a day in shifts—blocking attacks and cleaning up poisoned data—is no longer sustainable as a volunteer effort. We have survived and combatted many forms of attacks over the decades, but Entropy has finally won.
When the board made this final vote yesterday, we were looking at over 80 years of combined metaverse experience sitting around the table at Hurliman. We are not just administrators ‘shutting down a server; we are veterans of this grid watching our own history burn alongside yours. To our 153,000 registered users: we know exactly what this erasure means. You didn’t just log in here. You built a society. You coded, crafted, and lived in these regions for nearly two decades. Wiping a database isn’t just deleting files—it is bulldozing digital homes, severing daily connections, and burying a completely unique chapter of internet history. The gravity of this loss is absolute. We are not walking away lightly; we are taking this hit right on the front lines with you, because the technical reality of this poisoned architecture left us zero alternative.
So unfortunately we’re sad to inform you : The OSgrid services will shut down at midnight on December 31, 2026.
We invite you to gather with us one last time. We will hold a final membership meeting next Sunday, the 18th, at 11:00 AM at Hurliman Plaza.
Normally we don't permit discussion of other virtual worlds or grids preferring those topics go to r/opensim (etc) however we feel this news is likely to impact many who are also Second Life users.
Edit : Just discovered that opensim's sub is set private .. <picard_facepalm.gif>
