There is a time, at the end of the year, when the world seems to slow down. The virtual one, too. The lights dim, chats become quieter, and traces remain: written words, shared images, places traversed together. It is from here that this reflection is born, like a last glance before the calendar turns the page.
A World Made of Relationships
OpenSim has never been just a platform.
It was and is a space of relationship, a place where identities narrated themselves without haste, where voices found a body even without a real face.
In 2025, we saw small but tenacious communities grow, capable of resisting the speed of the contemporary web by choosing depth instead.
The project dedicated to women was a powerful example of this: not a simple container of events, but a collective traversing of stories, experiences, and gazes.
We spoke of memory, of freedom, of language; we chose to inhabit digital space with awareness, transforming it into a place that is social and poetic at the same time.
Writing the Virtual
The articles born this year demonstrated that the virtual world can still be recounted with depth and cultural sensitivity. Not chronicles of pixels, but narratives of meaning. Writing was an act of resistance against the rapid oblivion of disposable content.
Every article left a trace: it captured a moment, a dialogue, a collective construction. It demonstrated that the virtual is not the opposite of the real, but a possible extension of it, capable of guarding reflections that find no space elsewhere.
Places That Remain
The Christmas market, with its suspended lights and voices crossing between one stall and another, was more than a seasonal event. It was a gesture of care. In a historical time often marked by distance and fragmentation, recreating a shared ritual, even in digital form, meant reaffirming the value of being together.
And then the regions explored, built, sometimes abandoned, but never useless. Every virtual space has preserved the memory of those who passed through it. In OpenSim, even silence speaks: it tells of the passage of communities, dreams, attempts.
Love
In this world made of avatars and coordinates, there was also space for love. A discreet love, often silent, far from the noisy rhetoric of social media. Love as attention, as listening, as constant presence. Love for projects carried forward without clamor, for people met evening after evening, for virtual places tended to as one does with a home. Love was not a spectacle, but care: time donated, words chosen, the act of staying.
A Future That Is in No Rush
We close 2025 knowing that the virtual world no longer survives on large numbers, but on authentic presences. OpenSim continues to exist because someone chooses, every day, to enter not for consumption, but for participation.
And speaking of the future, do not forget that on January 27, 2026, we will celebrate a full 16 years of life at Craft World. I won’t anticipate how it will unfold this year: surely someone from the editorial team has their most detailed article in the works. I don’t want to steal the spotlight 🙂
The future will not necessarily be bigger, faster, or more visible. But it may be truer.
Made of projects born from the bottom up, of shared writings, of spaces that do not ask for performance but for listening.
This reflection of mine is not a balance sheet, but a thank you, to those who built, wrote, inhabited.
To those who believed that even in the virtual, one can make culture, relationship, community.
Tomorrow will be another year. But some traces, fortunately, remain. Other new ones will arrive.
Happy New Year’s Eve to one and all: may this night be a night of light, not only in the sky, but also in your hearts.
