Eh it's pretty niche unless your looking for ERP.
Everyone pretty much either left or moved on to VRChat.

I think I still have my SL , I think might run around again sometime.

yeh, that is the other reason i was wondering. The VR. On one hand I dont see for those VRchats to be popupar since the VR sets are costly. But I see so many videos with people messing with it.

Still plenty of people around though in some communities, they've just gotten a bit smaller I think. I think VR Chat is more popular because more people know about it, due to it being on more public platforms.

I belive more shy people would still dwell on SL. Since you dont have to use voice chat there. at I would never really do any RP through the mic. Im too shy for that lol.

I know there's still furry groups, I don't usually check them out anymore though. A few pony ones around too. Depends what you're after I guess.

I was mostly after maybe people with non sexual preferneces, and people who are into futa amazons if I did look for some kink groups. (havenot found any pony stuff i like so far)

Whenever I went on there, I found ghost towns. I also found that the controls were not designed well.

Yeah, I found the controls a biy weird, maybe they best with consol controller, I yet to test it.

The reason why SL feels so barren is because it has a lot of space. 1.6 mil km², which is roughly 5 times the size of Germany. At the same time - even though there a multiple millions of players registered, rarely more than 50.000 are online at once. This still makes it 1.7 more densely populated than Earth, but it sure has a lot of excess space.

If you are looking for active players, you can ignore roughly 70% of the grid and seek out the community hub areas. The search tool (ctrl + F) can help you with that. My girlfriend and I are online almost every day, building stuff, meeting friends, chatting, having some (e)RP. If you want to explore, well, someone did the math and figured out that traversing the grid on foot would take roughly 4500 days.

VR Chat mostly took away some of the meme culture from SL, but frankly, that is not the worst of losses.

If you want a tour, hit me up.

Yeh, I see how the too much space can just spread the people all over.

And sure, I might need some help to get around. You use same nick there and here?

Yus, Tali Twist is my full name, Twizzy the screen name

I've been an on/off user since 2008 and I still play to this day. Hell, I'm logged in right now.

Yes, SL has been slowly dying off since the peak years are long gone, but it still has a pretty steady userbase. Granted there's never enough people these days for every sim to have life all hours of the day. My experience these days is a lot of larger adult furry clubs are always full of people, and the smaller ones are either quiet save for a few moments in the day, or people sit around and idle or PM each other and never talk.

Still, it's a fun way to be able to visualize your character and have some fun with friends if they're willing to put up with SL's quirkiness. There's still a few fun hangouts to explore here and there.

If you ever want an old veteran to show you around, feel free to hit me up. I usually bum around a couple kink clubs or a Pokémon furry group I recently found.

I think a lot of the issues plaguing SL these days, as well as the reason people are turned off by it, is the unintuitive menus and the lack of any proper explanation of how to do anything interesting aside from walk and talk. Hell, WASD controls are hidden behind a menu setting and that's the first thing new folks complain about.

Anyone who uses SL for any length of time will immediately tell you to never use the program Linden makes you download and instead use a third party application like Firestorm, as it's a little better optimized and has a TON of useful features you can't get in vanilla SL.

Agree, menu feels weird and outdated. And controls were akward to say the lest, not right down terrible thou.

And I can still use SL through the Firstorm?

yeah, just google phoenix-firestorm and look for the download section there, I personally love it over the new v3 SL viewer... it has that old nostalgic feel of when I first started playing back in 2006/2009 (two accounts... forgot the first one till I made the second lol) and it's a lot more "streamlined" none of the "flair" that LL wanted to throw in to make it more appealing to the younger crowds. Plus it seems like there's a lot more fine tuning and customization that you can do with firestorm compared to LL's V3

I cancelled my account after a couple of months because of the terrible controls.