Decentralising the space server

I'd like to suggest the decentralisation of the Space Server of the Grid.

By decentralising the space server, I really mean putting the "which sim is running on the other side of this region boundary ?" service into each region by breaking it down into elementary pieces, so that every region is responsible for keeping track of who's its neighbour - instead of keeping track of it all in a centralised way that hampers scalability. It also means getting rid of a single map for all of SL, and instead having a map for every given set of interconnected sims. (For performance purpose I suggest temp-caching the whole set of interconnected sims info on each sim of this set.)

There are currently a LOT of private islands compared to the continents' regions, and those islands form myriads of little continents of their own. Having to keep all these on the same single map is an unnatural constraint that made "space reservations" necessary: it wouldn't be the case anymore.

Currently you cannot see any sim that is not directly or indirectly connected to that in which you are, so it's pointless to keep track of relative positions of different continents or sets of private islands, despite the metaphore for an atlas. One cannot (at least I cannot on any of my Macs, maybe I'm mistaken) see all those islands on the map anyway, except at a high zoom factor that makes it incredibly long and impractical to pan around the whole of SL looking at the islands and their names to find new places or just get an impression of where they are relative to each other... Additionnally, the sheer number of regions in SL now attained, and the introduction of P2P-TP, have made any semblance of such "localization" futile for most SL players. We don't travel from place to place following directions, we just hop there in a blink. Therefore maintaining an illusory "distance and direction" between unconnected places in SL is a waste.

It wouldn't even cause trouble with gridwide coordinates, since objects don't teleport across the ocean anyway: unconnected regions need not respect a mutual exclusion of global coordinates (only required by a centralised algorithm), the only thing needed for such consistency is that connected regions maintain consistent coordinates among themselves only.

Other gains this suggestion can make possible are:
- possibility to interconnect unrelated grids
- possibility to interconnect and interdisconnect sims at will ("moving" a region simply becomes meaningless) so we can have dynamic geography (just like the Web already had ever since: websites are not localized in a grand global map, but relative to each other they connect to). Sim owners could very easily contribute whole regions to specific events, at will.

See my responce in your other, exactly identicle, if with different title and different post, but the same suggestion.

I suspect the Map represents a awareness of 'self'.. I mean we don't look at the map as a way of finding the shortest route to our destination.. we as humans just like to know whats around us, or whether the sim we are contemplating is 'out in the wild' or connected to 'civilisation'.
Obvioulsy there are 'mechanics' invloved with producing, storing and updating such a map and no doubt better solutions to the one being deployed. Perhaps its just another one of those things that LL should consider contracting out to a 3rd party.