Since it opened in June 2024, Primfeed, the social media / photo-sharing platform geared towards Second Life users has been gradually gaining ain features and capabilities – as well as users; and December 13th, 2024 marked would could be a particularly significant move: providing the ability for Primfeed users to open their feed and gallery for viewing by non-Primfeed users / those not logged into the service.
This is particularly relevant, as one of the critiques of the platform since it opened is that is a essentially a closed service: to view anything, up until December 1th, 2024, one had to create a Primfeed account; something long recognised by Primfeed’s creator, Luke Rowley.
For a social media [platform], this restriction was a considerable downside for discoverability, or just knowing what to expect when you click a link. Now, every resident can open their profile and content to the public. You can change this setting by navigating to the “Edit your profile” button on your profile. If you open your profile to the public, your content will be visible to anyone, even if they’re not logged into Primfeed.
– Luke Rowley, announcing the ability to make Primfeed feeds public
As noted above, making a Profile (/timeline) public is a simple two-step process for those who wish to do so, and can be reversed at any time. Whether it is used or not in therefore a matter of personal choice; by default, users’ feeds will remain private unless the “public” option is explicitly set.
In addition, when the option is set:
- Each type of link (events, profiles, or posts) now has its own preview when shared on messaging apps or social media.
- Only General or Moderate content within an individual’s profile will be visible when it is made public; to avoid the potential of giving offence or violating other platform’s terms of service when sharing content, items rated as Adult and Adult+ within an individual’s profile will remain only viewable to those actually logged-in to Primfeed.
On a purely personal note, I think Luke taken the optimal route in making this capability opt-in rather than opt-out. Not everyone will want to have their profile generally discoverable, and it is a lot more sensible to have those who do to go through the one-time step of setting the option for themselves rather than risking those who don’t want to have their profile so exposed, and feeling they’d has been forced to do so, and inconvenienced by having to disable the option.
There is still much that I would personally like to see added to Primfeed – such as the ability to use BB code or similar with the images I post to Primfeed so that I might also embed them into blog posts, etc., – but I know Luke has a sizeable backlog of options and capabilities he is working through (including the above). As such, he’s attempting to deal with things on the basis of adding the more popular requests as a priority – and and noted, Primfeed being a “closed” environment has been is particular cause of frustration with the platform. Hopefully, this will now change – and I certainly look froward to seeing what else is coming down the pipe for the platform in due course.
In the meantime, if you’re unfamiliar with Primfeed and want to know more, read my overview of the service and discussion about it with Luke.
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