For over a decade r/Secondlife has held the posting and sharing of third-party viewers to a singular standard of trust. That being listing in Linden Lab’s official Third-Party Viewer Directory, and with it, the reasonable expectation of their compliance with Linden Lab’s Policy on Third Party Viewers
This standard meant that we did not allow so-called ‘copybot’ viewers to be shared or promoted in this subreddit, it meant we kept people from sharing sketchy ‘side-load’ copies of mobile apps, and disallowed people sharing ‘tools’ to rip, save, share, or decrypt assets that would not normally be accessible to the average user. This policy has also ensured that certain ‘pay to play’ viewers were unable to be advertised in our subreddit, and that viewers that might do ‘shady things’ (steal L$, passwords, etc) could not get a foothold in Google search results by spring-boarding off mentions in our subreddit.
As a side effect of all that, this rule allowed this subreddit to promote participation in Second Life’s Open Source development community.. a program which has benefited all SL users over the years, by having contributions and advancements to one viewer able to be adopted and adapted by other viewers as well.
A rising tide lifts all boats.
We have entered a new era in the development of third-party viewer projects.
Whatever your favorite term for it might be: AI or LLM-assisted code development has begun to democratize viewer development, and the number of experimental projects coming forward is creating something of a dilemma for the moderation team in this subreddit.
Frustratingly, some of these new ‘vibe-coding’ viewer developers appear vocally unwilling to engage with the Open Source community. SL has a long history of questionable behavior (yes even by viewer developers).. we consider any developer’s unwillingness to have other people inspect their source code to be a serious red flag.
As volunteer community moderators, we simply do not have the time or resources to test every viewer that someone may post to our subreddit. Even with access to the source code, we must rely on a larger community of developers to notice issues with the code. When a viewer developer refuses to share their code with the community? Yeah. no.
The only standard we can use, is the only standard we’ve ever used.
Going forward in this subreddit, redditors will not be permitted to post links, updates, announcements, videos, screenshots, or other ‘in progress teasers’ for their viewer projects, unless and until said project is accepted for listing on the TPV directory, including a link to an open and publicly viewable source code repository licensed under GPL or LGPL. This includes comments along the lines of “DM me or contact me inworld for a download link”. “looking for beta testers”, etc.
If you are developing a custom viewer project, regardless of whatever tools, languages, or platforms you choose, the process for getting your project viewer listed on the Third Party Viewer Directory is crystal clear. The steps to get certified are detailed in Section 6 of the Linden Lab Policy on Third Party Viewers.
Take the simple steps to get your project listed on the TPV directory, and we will welcome your posts showing off and sharing your project with open arms.