SPR has been down the past couple days or so. This is as good a time as any to discuss distributed MU* a little.
Beyond having to commune with friends in other virtual places, and the strain it puts on free server hosts (as mentioned yesterday), a MUCK being down is inconvenient for people who've built things there, investing time and energy for world creation. It's the same deal as when your web site is on someone else's server: you're pretty helpless as far as people seeing your site is concerned.
Having been staff on a few, I know that when MUCKs crash and data is lost, people are annoyed if they didn't keep copies of their work. I learned to do that quite a while ago, since one never knows what will happen, and it's easy enough to keep a script one can play back to the MUCK to rebuild whatever. I understand that I own my data.
However, I still depend on someone to serve it: on my disk it's just a script of building directions, as it takes a MUCK server to breathe life into it. So why not just run my own server? No one will come and use it, and see my work; anyone who's given up running one's own public MUCK from lack of users understands that. Collaborative world building environments like MUCKs operate first and foremost on Metcalfe's Law--the value of a network grows by the square of the size of the network
--which is why FurryMUCK and SPR remain popular by already being popular.
The idea of a distributed MU* would change that: make the virtual world more like the web, where a link can be to another page in the same site just as easily as a page somewhere else entirely.
