OpenSim’s public grids gained 3,151 active users this month, with 15 grids reporting increases of more than 100 actives.
However, land area and registered user numbers were both town.
Most of the loss in land area was due to a major cleanup on OSgrid. The grid reported a drop of more than 800,000 standard region equivalents. Most of that was due to the shutdown of a geographic simulation project, but there was also a loss of other regions, most likely due to a database cleanup.
OSgrid allows anyone to connect regions, including people who run regions on home computers that are not up all the time. To keep other people from grabbing a region’s map location each time a region owner’s computer is shut off, OSgrid maintains the map reservations. If the region owner doesn’t use that spot for awhile, it’s considered abandoned, and the reservation reverts — and the region is no longer counted in the grid’s stats. At least, until the next time the region owner connects to the grid and picks a new map location.
Otherwise, grids grew in size — 39 grids reported an increase in the number of regions, 26 reported a drop, and 129 grids reported no changes in land area.
And the drop in registered users is due to the OpenSimulator Community Conference grid not reporting its stats this month. Last month, it had 2,646 registered users.
The bottom line? OpenSim’s public grids reported 148,135 standard region equivalents this month, a drop of 14,636 from last month. The grids reported 493,734 registered users, a drop of 205 — and 48,018 active users, an increase of 3,151.
The following grids were added to our database this month: Homelandz, Kara Islands Estate, Paralax Life, Russian Grid, Spartans Keep, Virtual Travelers, Willow Lake, and XTAL.
The following seven grids were marked suspended this month: Alpha Grid, Bridger, Ghost Area, Joe’s Place, Lost World, Meta Worldrix, and U4ria Grid.
Our stats do not include most of the grids running on DreamGrid, a free easy-to-use version 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:
Top 25 most popular grids this month:
- Wolf Territories Grid: 11,896 active users
- OSgrid: 4,122 active users
- GBG World: 2,415 active users
- Alternate Metaverse: 2,221 active users
- DigiWorldz: 2,189 active users
- WaterSplash: 1,686 active users
- Darkheart’s Playground: 1,547 active users
- Groovy Verse: 1,383 active users
- Sciattisi Grid: 1,317 active users
- Neverworld: 1,042 active users
- Sanctum Astra: 966 active users
- AvatarLife: 918 active users
- Trianon World: 914 active users
- Craft World: 869 active users
- Littlefield: 804 active users
- Party Destination Grid: 758 active users
- AviWorlds: 741 active users
- BloodMoon: 736 active users
- New Life Italy: 713 active users
- Gentle Fire Grid: 526 active users
- Astralia: 487 active users
- SpaceGrid: 481 active users
- Eureka World: 480 active users
- Vivo Sim: 428 active users
- ZetaWorlds: 426 active users
Online marketplaces for OpenSim content
There are currently 21,183 product listings in Kitely Market, containing 41,964 product variations, of which 36,683 are exportable, according to Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner.
Kitely Market has delivered orders to 673 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 256 active grids this month, 205 of which published statistics. I’m currently tracking a total of 2,596 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: 33,497 regions
- OSgrid: 23,956 regions
- Kitely: 17,840 regions
- ZetaWorlds: 17,001 regions
- Groovy Verse: 14,889 regions
- Alternate Metaverse: 11,288 regions
- DigiWorldz: 3,186 regions
- Neverworld: 2,632 regions
- GBG World: 1,929 regions
- Discovery Grid: 1,614 regions
- Tag Grid: 1,545 regions
- Friends Grid: 1,417 regions
- ArtDestiny: 1,156 regions
- Sub-Version Space: 1,065 regions
- Craft World: 950 regions
- Virtual Worlds Grid: 910 regions
- AviWorlds: 809 regions
- Exotic Realities: 733 regions
- Kinky Haven: 689 regions
- AvatarLife: 636 regions
- New Life Italy: 591 regions
- Virtual Worlds Zone: 558 regions
- Littlefield: 533 regions
- Darkheart’s Playground: 433 regions
- Furry World: 358 regions
- BloodMoon: 320 regions
- EdMondo: 310 regions
- Migrating Coconuts: 247 regions
- Open Virtual Worlds: 241 regions
- OliGrid: 214 regions
- MisFitz Grid: 213 regions
- Virtual Vista Metaverse: 199 regions
- Japan Open Grid: 199 regions
- Adreans-World: 171 regions
- Kater and Friends: 164 regions
- Maze of The Mind: 154 regions
- I Love You Grid: 150 regions
- GerGrid: 141 regions
- Utopia Skye: 139 regions
- Logicamp: 136 regions
Do you know of any other grids that are open to the public but that we don’t have in our database? Email me at [email protected].
