Pearl/Ziiverse

History

Ziiverse Development

On January 21, 2018, Closedverse's server experienced a long shutdown. Closedverse users began posting on Cedar, prompting Ben to begin development of Ziiverse on that day. Like Cedar, Ziiverse was developed in PHP. On February 15, Ben managed to get the Ziiverse database to successfully work, and hosted a beta for two days. Due to the lack of interest or knowledge of Ziiverse, only three French users joined the beta. The beta had a discussion community to talk about Ziiverse and a community for news about the site. Shortly after, a Ziiverse article was made on Closedverse Dramatica to describe the clone's development process. According to the article, Ziiverse was planned to have:

• • "Virtual Console" communities for pre-Wii era games

  • A clone of Wii U chat known as ZiiUChat

  • Special applications that allow users to post on Splatoon or the Warawara Plaza directly from a physical Wii U

  • A theme shop with five themes available when the site released:

    • PreDesign

    • Redesign

    • E3 2012 Wii U demo

    • 3DS

    • An unspecified original theme that Ben worked on

  • A more "competent" administration compared to Closedverse

  • Special communities for E3, Nintendo Directs, PlayStation and Xbox games, and Ziiverse events

  • The ability to post on the Activity Feed

A wiki for Ziiverse was also made, under ziiverse.wikia.com, though it has since been deleted. Ziiverse was published under multiple domains, including use-cedar.epizy.com, cedar.rf.gd, and ziiverse.ga. Italian and Japanese versions of the site were also made. Additionally, unofficial copies of Ziiverse were made by clone users Sad Meme and Konameme, titled Fakeziiverse (zii.x10host.com) and Konaziiverse (konameme.rf.gd/ziiverse.html) respectively. Both have since shut down.

Pearl

"Welcome to Pearl! Pearl is a clone of Nintendo's Miiverse written by Ben in PHP. It is vastly different from other Miiverse clones as it has a family friendly atmosphere, a console version, and over 60 designated communities for games."

Icon and banner of the Pearl Community ("Pear Community") on Oasis.

"For Miiverse Users, by Miiverse users. Discuss Ben’s upcoming Miiverse clone here."

Community Number: 41

Ben eventually scrapped the idea of Ziiverse around April of 2018, and renamed the clone to Pearl (sometimes referred to as Pear). While it was still in development, a community was made for Pearl on Oasis in May of 2018. Ben hosted a "coming soon" advert on olvpearl.heliohost.org which claimed that the site would be released on July 3, 2018.

When Pearl was released, it had roughly the same Code of Conduct as the original Miiverse. This meant that profanity was prohibited, and a bot would automatically delete posts containing profanity shortly after they were made. Additionally, users were unable to post images, which made Pearl comparable to Miiverse before its redesign. Some users praised this decision, claiming that it was the most faithful clone of Miiverse and that it would enourage higher quality posts.

Ben also made a version of Pearl called Fakepearl that functioned like Grape's Wii U design, under the link pearl.pf2m.com.

Pearl eventually shut down several weeks after its release. Ben released another version of Pearl on October 20, 2018 under the domain olv-pearl.gq to test the features of Uiiverse, which was shut down on January 14, 2019 due to Uiiverse gaining increasing activity. Uiiverse credits Pearl for part of its source code.

Pearl went back up for a short period sometime in October of 2019. A new Discord server for Pearl was also created, which shut down around early November of 2019.