OpenSim’s land area and active users both decreased this week, mostly due to an OSgrid outage lasting more than two weeks.
Since OSgrid has been online in the past month, it is still included in this stats report.
The public metaverse lost the equivalent of 4,116 standard-sized regions this month, and 370 active users for a new total of 145,420 regions and 48,006 actives.
In addition, Littlefield, which had more than 400 regions and over 600 actives last month, did not report any statistics this month and, as of its writing, the website is down, there have been no updates to its Twitter page since early 2025, and its Faccebook page says “content unavailable.”
The total number of registered users went up however, by more than 7,000, mostly due to the fact that EdMondo — an educational grid that has over 10,000 registered users — was back up. It was down in May.
The following grids were added to our database this month: Ay Island, Flotsam, Kirmes Creations, Lux Serenity, MK3, OpenSim Network, and SkyeLand.
The following 12 grids were suspended this month: Alterlifes, Austria Grid, CandorsRPWorld, Fresh MetaVerse Retro, Life RPG World, Nekolution, Ocean Grid, Serenity, Sublimit Metaverse, Tedesco Sim’s, Vivec, and XTAL.
Our stats do not include most of the grids running on DreamGrid, a free, easy-to-use version of OpenSim, since these tend to be private grids.
OpenSim is a free, open-source virtual world platform that’s similar to Second Life and allows people with no technical skills to quickly and cheaply create virtual worlds and teleport to other virtual worlds. Those with technical skills can run OpenSim worlds on their servers for free using either DreamGrid, the official OpenSim installer for those who are more technically inclined, or any other distribution, while commercial hosting starts at less than $5 a region.
A list of OpenSim hosting providers is here. If you offer region rentals and are not on this list, email me!
You can download the recommended Firestorm viewer here and find out where to get content for your OpenSim world or region here.
Hypergrid Business newsletter is now available
Every month on the 15th — right after the stats report comes out — we will be sending out a newsletter with all the OpenSim news from the previous month. You can subscribe here or fill out the form below.
Top 25 grids by active users
When it comes to general-purpose social grids, especially closed grids, the rule of thumb is the busier the better. People looking to make new friends look for grids that already have the most users. Merchants looking to sell content will go to the grids with the most potential customers. Event organizers looking for the biggest audience — you get the idea.
Top 25 most popular grids this month:
- Wolf Territories Grid: 12,855 active users
- OSgrid: 3,180 active users
- GBG World: 2,481 active users
- Alternate Metaverse: 2,247 active users
- DigiWorldz: 1,971 active users
- Darkheart’s Playground: 1,529 active users
- Groovy Verse: 1,509 active users
- Cave Grid: 1,247 active users
- Sciattisi Grid: 1,134 active users
- Neverworld: 1,126 active users
- Sanctum Astra: 936 active users
- New Life Italy: 905 active users
- Trianon World: 899 active users
- AvatarLife: 824 active users
- Craft World: 778 active users
- BloodMoon: 723 active users
- AviWorlds: 719 active users
- Party Destination Grid: 719 active users
- Friends Grid: 606 active users
- Free Life: 519 active users
- SpaceGrid: 503 active users
- Eureka World: 446 active users
- ZetaWorlds: 444 active users
- Astralia: 425 active users
- MK3: 395 active users
Online marketplaces for OpenSim content
As of May, there are 21,960 product listings in Kitely Market, containing 42,792 product variations, of which 37,485 are exportable, according to Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner.
“Given OSgrid’s current downtime, I’d like to remind people who bought items in Kitely Market and had them delivered to their OSgrid avatars that they can have those orders redelivered to their Kitely avatar,” Tochner told Hypergrid Business. “Kitely provides a reliable home for people and enables buyers from Kitely Market to regain access to their lost purchases if their grid shuts down.”
Kitely Market has delivered orders to 679 OpenSim grids to date.
Historically, all the Kitely Market growth has been in exportable content. This means that buyers can have their purchases delivered directly to avatar inventories on other grids, and that they can travel to other grids with the content.
In the early days of OpenSim, many creators considered this to be a security risk, and non-exportable content dominated. But creators quickly realized that most copybotted content actually comes from Second Life, where everything is non-exportable. And, in general, copybot tools and content thieves don’t bother to check item permissions before committing their thefts. Instead, allowing people to purchase exported content legally, conveniently, and at reasonable prices destroys the copybot economy entirely, leaving only a handful of freebie stores on grids that haven’t yet noticed that they exist and taken them down.
Another source of legitimate content on OpenSim is Linda Kellie’s products, and those of other creators that give them away for free under Creative Commons and similar licenses. Many official freebie stores on OpenSim grids offer these products.
This is similar to how Netflix and other low-cost and free streaming services dramatically reduced online movie piracy.
The Kitely Market is the largest collection of commercial legal content available in OpenSim. It is accessible to both hypergrid-enabled and closed, private grids. The instructions for how to configure the Kitely Market for closed grids are here.
Top 40 grids by land area
All region counts on this list are, whenever available, in terms of standard region equivalents. Active user counts include hypergrid visitors whenever possible.
There were a total of 314 active grids this month, 241 of which published statistics. I’m currently tracking a total of 2,143 grids.
Many school, company, or personal grids do not publish their numbers.
The raw data for this month’s report is here. A list of all active grids is here. And here is a list of all the hypergrid-enabled grids and their hypergrid addresses, sorted by popularity. This is very useful if you are creating a hyperport.
You can see all the historical OpenSim statistics here, including polls and surveys, dating all the way back to 2009.
- Wolf Territories Grid: 33,856 regions
- OSgrid: 21,088 regions
- Kitely: 17,730 regions
- ZetaWorlds: 16,954 regions
- Groovy Verse: 13,986 regions
- Alternate Metaverse: 11,883 regions
- Neverworld: 2,984 regions
- DigiWorldz: 2,520 regions
- GBG World: 1,929 regions
- Discovery Grid: 1,614 regions
- Tag Grid: 1,577 regions
- Friends Grid: 1,497 regions
- Sub-Version Space: 1,040 regions
- ArtDestiny: 1,024 regions
- Virtual Worlds Grid: 910 regions
- Craft World: 907 regions
- Exotic Realities: 759 regions
- Kinky Haven: 705 regions
- AviWorlds: 646 regions
- New Life Italy: 636 regions
- AvatarLife: 632 regions
- Virtual Worlds Zone: 562 regions
- Darkheart’s Playground: 424 regions
- Furry World: 358 regions
- BloodMoon: 313 regions
- EdMondo: 310 regions
- Migrating Coconuts: 247 regions
- Open Virtual Worlds: 241 regions
- MisFitz Grid: 210 regions
- Japan Open Grid: 201 regions
- Funny Rides: 193 regions
- Sense Limits: 185 regions
- Spartans Keep: 180 regions
- Maze of The Mind: 174 regions
- I Love You Grid: 172 regions
- Kater and Friends: 171 regions
- Dynamic Worldz: 171 regions
- Adreans-World: 165 regions
- Seconds: 161 regions
- Logicamp: 142 regions
Do you know of any other grids that are open to the public but that I don’t have in my database? Email me at [email protected].
