Their Web site seems to have disappeared last year, but seems very relevant to the current "metaverse" hype. In particular, OpenCobalt is easily programmable, supports a bunch of standards like XMPP (chat) and VNC (virtual desktop). It's also decentralised: users can navigate from one server to another by moving through portals (hyperlinks).

Archive.org really are "doing god's work" (so to speak). How many sites and how much knowledge would be lost from the 'net forever without them?

Exactly! And its not just we pages - a lot of digital heritage is being lost, even though we now have the technology to digitally preserve about anything.

Flash games that one can't play without a flash player, online games that can no longer be played without company run servers, modern arcade machines that will no longer run without a backend server, etc.

I would really welcome if more people though about how to preserve out current digital culture for the long run...

> online games that can no longer be played without company run servers

I saw someone in another thread recently mention that it should be a law that if you shut down your online game, you have to release the source code for the server and client. I don't entirely disagree with this notion.

If you sell people a product and then decide to stop supporting it, why would it hurt you to let your customers support it.

> Flash games

Just in case you hadn't come across Flashpoint: https://bluemaxima.org/flashpoint/

  Since early 2018, Flashpoint has saved more than 100,000 games and 10,000 animations running on 35 different platforms.

Yep, this is a very welcome initiative! :)

Knowledge lost and prior art put under patent.

I've been busy and hadn't paid attention to google sites' "upgrade". It is on my to do list now.

A lot of these projects seem to emit a depressing virtual office building aura. Where's the fun in that?

I think there is a trend of virtual world projects pivoting to virtual office meeting/collaboration software when it doesn't do well.

Because that is where the grant money was. Also, the start space was a giant room so it had plenty of "space" to demo.

The only evolution of this software that anyone is currently working on is at

https://croquet.io/

I came across that, but it seems to have lost the open/p2p/distributed/no-permission-necessary nature that I find appealing.

Just a note, since a lot of people will probably miss it: this was made in the Squeak dialect of Smalltalk.

SecondLife cracked this 15 years ago.

Not really. SecondLife is a closed, centralized platform. I know the client is open source and that Open Simulator exists, but it's not quite the same thing. The Croquet Project[1] (what Open Cobalt is built on) allowed P2P virtual worlds that users could travel between.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquet_Project

OpenCobalt has been around even longer than SecondLife, if we count the various forks/renames (Croquet/OpenCroquet/Qwak/etc.)

Edit: It seems SecondLife is slightly older than I though (2003, versus Croquet's 2005)

Before that (in the 90s): Blaxxun Interactive.

I’m only missing OpenWonderland on HN front page now to have the complete Networked Virtual Environment nightmare combo from my PhD days.

Ya know, I had thought about submitting that link yesterday or so, but got distracted and never did. Submitted just now, since you brought it up!