There were a record 20 avatars at DrFran’s weekly salon in High Fidelity, which is effectively shutting down as of January 15th, 2020, trying to figure out what they are going to do in response to all the bad news. New users will not be able to create accounts on High Fidelity after that date, which means that in-world meetings of this kind will be increasingly unlikely, as the existing userbase drifts away to other platforms.
As far as we are all aware, there are at least three forks of High Fidelity’s open-source software code in various stages of development:
- Tivoli Cloud VR (which I have written about before);
- Kitely’s fork (which I wrote about here); and
- Project Athena, which does not yet have a website but does have a Github repository
None of them is currently up and running, which means that there will possibly be an “in-between” period where HiFi users will not have a home. DrFran said that she is not sure she will be continuing her weekly salon in the new year, which leaves the Federated HiFi users Discord (and of course, my own cross-worlds Discord) as places where High Fidelity’s diaspora can meet and discuss issues.
UPDATE Dec. 16th, 2019: Caitlyn Meeks has shared with me the invitation to join the Tivoli Cloud VR Discord server. Thanks, Caitlyn!
UPDATE Dec. 17th, 2019: There’s also a new Discord server for Project Athena; here’s the invite link to join.
UPDATE April 3rd, 2020: Project Athena has now rebranded itself as Vircadia.
The best thing to due is cut losses and move on as Philip Rosedale can’t seem to make it work and has definitely lost faith ion VR. Sad but at this point not unexpected.