25 groups limiting social integration
Posted by Shava Suntzu at 7/31/2007 2:22 PM and is filed under social.networking,best.practices,in-world.tech,linden.lab 
Right now, LL leaves residents with a limit of 25 groups they can join. Groups serve as mailing lists, group chat, and permissions for sharing collaborative projects -- essentially access control lists for those who know that term.
If I were to guess it's because of the access control -- the ability to share modification or land rights with a group -- that groups are limited by a certain number.
With this mixture of uses, and limited alternatives, most folks who've been active in world for even a few months start running out of groups.
For some purposes, people can go outside LL to create alternative methods of communicating like a mailing list, or group chat. But this requires either revealing a RL email address or creating an email just for the avatar (and then tracking multiple identities online -- something that seems much more natural to my younger friends than to my contemporaries.
But access control linked to groups can not be separated from SL.
One tends to wonder why the LL developers designed only 25 groups in a resident's record. However, the number is overdue for revision, and in fact, I would wonder why it would be limited at all? If someone wants to receive the chat and notification spam from 200 groups, is that a real issue?
But here is the real issue -- groups are a much more important map of SL than the physical geography. A world map of Second Life has no meaningful national boundaries. Even zoning is unknown in much of SL's "territory."
So to find a map of SL, you need to really track the map of social capital through the community -- and that taxonomy is composed of friends lists (private) and groups (often public). This would be a great topic for someone's thesis, to create such a map.
Meanwhile, the twenty-five group limit is choking the spread of social capital in SL, actually punishing people who share land, create collaborative projects, and so on. Such people have far less room for, say, announcement lists for cultural events, sales announcements from their favorite creators/vendors, clubs, religious groups, and other social activities that don't have to do with access control.
If the groups list is limited to limit access control issues, perhaps the annoucement/chat type groups and the land/item access groups should be divorced?
If I were to guess it's because of the access control -- the ability to share modification or land rights with a group -- that groups are limited by a certain number.
With this mixture of uses, and limited alternatives, most folks who've been active in world for even a few months start running out of groups.
For some purposes, people can go outside LL to create alternative methods of communicating like a mailing list, or group chat. But this requires either revealing a RL email address or creating an email just for the avatar (and then tracking multiple identities online -- something that seems much more natural to my younger friends than to my contemporaries.
But access control linked to groups can not be separated from SL.
One tends to wonder why the LL developers designed only 25 groups in a resident's record. However, the number is overdue for revision, and in fact, I would wonder why it would be limited at all? If someone wants to receive the chat and notification spam from 200 groups, is that a real issue?
But here is the real issue -- groups are a much more important map of SL than the physical geography. A world map of Second Life has no meaningful national boundaries. Even zoning is unknown in much of SL's "territory."
So to find a map of SL, you need to really track the map of social capital through the community -- and that taxonomy is composed of friends lists (private) and groups (often public). This would be a great topic for someone's thesis, to create such a map.
Meanwhile, the twenty-five group limit is choking the spread of social capital in SL, actually punishing people who share land, create collaborative projects, and so on. Such people have far less room for, say, announcement lists for cultural events, sales announcements from their favorite creators/vendors, clubs, religious groups, and other social activities that don't have to do with access control.
If the groups list is limited to limit access control issues, perhaps the annoucement/chat type groups and the land/item access groups should be divorced?
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Great points, Shava. Hadn't thought much of groups as a social map. And it makes a lot of sense that it is something that needs more development. Let's not forget on the limits on group notices (or is that fixed now?). And groups can be used for granting permissions to places but one big reason they are not used that way is the 25-groups limit.
It is definitely another area that needs improvement and that could have a huge effect on SL.
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Sigh. This is silly. There is no choking going on, just prune your groups. LL isn't doing this due to land rights, but due to their own data base limitations. It's a huge draw on their data bases, which many argue about as being badly set up, but whatever, to have these groups. I have groups with 700 people in them and they are very hard to manage precisely because the dbase simply won't fetch up all the names to perform actions. Half the time you can't even chat normally, it's buggy.
If you run out of groups on one avatar, make a second and pile on more passive groups that you only need news from or only need to access when you have time.
Groups used to be limited to only 10; you can imagine how hard it was to have only 10. That necessitated those of us in land groups especially to have to make alts which got expensive (if they were to be tier-holding alts especially). Earlier people lobbied the Lindens and they finally moved to 25. They are keenly aware of the need for more group space, it's not a design issue but a database and scaling issue like many other SL problems.
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It wasn't so long ago that the limit on groups was only 15. There's some basic reason in the way avatar information is stored that means it "doesn't scale".
Maybe groups aren't the answer. I don't see anything analogous to the way groups are done in SL in the regular world wide web. How do we manage?
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@prok: I'm not sure, on a programming basis, what the difference is between a design issue and a database issue. You design for scaling, or you don't; LL didnt'. You design data structures and sometimes you revise your map (as I proposed) and divide purposes.
Perhaps you mean a user interface design issue? In which case I'd understand the comment. But I think we agree this is a database issue.
My hope is that dividing out the various purposes for which one mechanism (the group) has been purposed might actually alleviate some of the scaling issues, allowing different sorts of limits.
For example, sometimes all you need is an announcement list, where one person is sending a notecard to an arbitrarily large audience. These groups might not need chat or permissions. This would eliminate the prospect of, say, a group used to promote a fashion designer's announcements.
It's simple, there's less load on the system, and you would be able to keep an arbitrary number of them active - it's no more than a mailing list, and it isn't dependent on each notecard being delivered in a second or two, so the operations can be queued at a lower priority.
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I find the group tags is more of a limitation on my SL activities than my L$ balance... and almost as big as my RL self's time and energy. I have actually passed up renting shop spaces in malls just because I didn't want to use a group slot to join the mall's groups. I was willing to risk the few hundred linden per month on rent, but I wasn't willing to sacrifice the group slot. I have passed on job offers as well because of the group slot issue.
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Shava, I agree. There is a Jira open on this issue at http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-208, and it's the most popular feature request with 1048 votes. As it stands people are getting throwaway alts just to track extra groups! But that's less than ideal because reputation is tied to one's primary avie.
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