I've been checking out OpenSimulator since I thought it was cool to have something that's largely Second Life compatible, but that you can host yourself and modify as you please. Renting an official Second Life region server is very expensive and owning a small portion of land is comparable to the price of a cheap VPS (since it requires a subscription), so it's compelling to get to have a bunch of space to myself for much less money.

I originally wanted to try hosting OpenSimulator on a Raspberry Pi 4, because the one I have is barely doing anything, and its main job has just been to run a Discord bot. I was able to grab an ARM64 build of the .NET 8 SDK and build OpenSimulator and have it just work. It actually works alright on a Pi 4 but I ran into problems where I couldn't visit from servers hosted by other people because the other servers would time out while attempting to contact mine. Sometimes it even timed out while I tried to connect to it from my own house. It's easy to forget that a Pi 4 really is substantially slower than any other modern computers I use, and that really limits what you can do with it (I have seen recommendations to get used business/office computers instead so it may be nice to switch in the future).

After I got a second VPS set up for Forgejo I figured that would be a good place to move my OpenSimulator server to, and that fixed the timeout issues so I can now visit from elsewhere just fine. Cool part about hosting stuff yourself (whether a home server or a VPS) is that you get to have ownership over your data and you can move it to a different server, make backups, or just take stuff offline for awhile without losing anything. That does mean my Pi 4 is back to not doing very much, but that's okay.

I think it's really cool that OpenSimulator supports federation; I like the ideal of virtual worlds as an open platform where you can just freely move between worlds owned by different people while bringing your avatar along, and it actually exists here. Though I did run into some problems with it, and I may need to figure out more information on what stuff carries over, and what kinds of changes need to be done where. For instance I've tried to modify my avatar on another server while shopping around for avatar parts, and then had to redo the changes because they weren't properly saved. It's also been hard to figure out what problems might be caused by limitations or problems in the software versus being caused by a misconfigured server. I could try and play with the bigger servers like Kitely and see if they have some of the same issues to help me figure that out. It would also be nice to see if I can find a community that could answer questions (like I could try the forums.)

Big downside of OpenSimulator (aside from jank) is that you don't have all of the stuff you bought on Second Life, and only have access to separate markets and freebies that are specific to OpenSimulator. Kitely has a place with starter avatar parts, including some furry avatars, and I set up a rabbit girl avatar. Would be nicer to get to be a pony though. But I think it's kind of fun to try and make things myself by being creative with primitive objects, like the very early days of Second Life. I could probably try and get into modeling myself, or find models I could import, and fill in some of the gaps there.

A downside of both OpenSimulator and Second Life is that I don't think that the actual chat messages and other information you send while connected are encrypted at all? They use UDP and I didn't see any mention of DTLS or anything like that. I guess unencrypted connections are normal for games (Petal Crash Online doesn't use encryption either, and doesn't have accounts or even the ability to send freeform chat) but I kinda view virtual worlds more like something that you'd want to protect. Tilemap Town can be fully protected with TLS and the official server is set up to require it.

You should be able to connect and visit here: https://os.novasquirrel.com:9002
There isn't much built but I guess you can laugh at seeing the ALDI logo.