All stats up this month on OpenSim grids

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All the stats were up this month on OpenSim’s public grids, including land area, registered users, and active users.

Land area was up by 49 standard region equivalents, to 83,516. OpenSim grids also registered 6,649 new users this month, for a new total of 421,087 registered users. The number of active users went up by 3,501, for a new total of 37,659.

OpenSim is a popular platform for educators, so traffic is routinely expected to drop during the summer months.

Total regions, in standard region equivalents on public OpenSim grids. (Hypergrid Business data.)

These stats do not include most of the grids running on OutWorldz’ DreamGrid distribution of OpenSim, or private company or school grids. OutWorldz, for example, reports that 3,715 grids are either currently offline or running in private mode, behind a firewall.

OpenSim is a free, open source virtual world platform that’s compatible with the Oculus Rift. It allows people with no technical skills to quickly and cheaply create virtual worlds, and then teleport to other virtual worlds. Those with technical skills can run OpenSim worlds on their own servers for free, while commercial hosting starts at less than $5 a region.

A list of hosting providers is here. Download the recommended Firestorm viewer here. And find out where to get content for your OpenSim world or region here.

You can also add your grid in the stats if it is not being crawled by OutWorldz. OutWorldz also provides OpenSim users with free mesh items, OARs and free seamless textures that you can download and use on your grids.

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:

  1. OSgrid: 4,464 active users (HG hg.osgrid.org:80)
  2. 3D Love: 2,904 active users (HG grid.3dlove.com.br:8002)
  3. GreekLife: 1,996 active users (HG hg.grid-greeklife.info:8002)
  4. Tag Grid: 1,826 active users
  5. Sacrarium: 1,730 active users (HG sacrarium24.ru:8002)
  6. DigiWorldz: 1,691 active users (HG login.digiworldz.com:8002)
  7. Metropolis: 1,565 active users (HG hg.metro.land:80)
  8. ZetaWorlds: 1,538 active users (HG hg.zetaworlds.com:80:Welcome)
  9. Foundation Grid: 1,079 active users (HG gridfoundation.ddns.net:8002)
  10. Kitely: 1,049 active users (HG grid.kitely.com:8002)
  11. Eureka World: 851 active users (HG 54.77.238.20:9000)
  12. Party Destination Grid: 814 active users (HG partydestinationgrid.com:8002)
  13. Exo-Life: 791 active users (HG hg.exo-life.onl:8032)
  14. VartownGrid: 759 active users (HG vartown-grid.ddns.net:8002)
  15. Discovery Grid: 690 active users (HG discoverygrid.net:8002)
  16. Breath in Freedom: 517 active users (HG breath-grid.info:8002)
  17. DreamNation: 478 active users
  18. Dorena’s World: 455 active users (HG dorenas-world.de:8002)
  19. Tranquility: 451 active users (HG tranquility-grid.info:8002)
  20. AviWorlds: 417 active users (HG login.aviworlds.com:8002)
  21. Neverworld: 409 active users (HG hg.neverworldgrid.com:8002)
  22. Pacification Grid: 382 active users (HG grid-pacification.info:8002)
  23. Craft World: 377 active users (HG craft-world.org:8002)
  24. Dynamic Worldz: 374 active users (HG grid.dynamicworldz.com:8002)
  25. Social Mouse: 367 active users (HG grid.thesocialmouse.net:8002)

The biggest gainers this month were AviWorlds, which is once again coming back from the dead and gained 311 new active users this month. OSgrid gained 207 new users.

The actives list is based on active, unique 30-day user login numbers that grids report on their stats pages. Those grids that don’t report their numbers might be just as popular, but we wouldn’t know. The active user stats are also used to generate the popular hypergrid destinations list, which is useful if you have a hyperport and want to put up gates to the most popular grids, or include the most popular grids in an in-world directory.

This list is also a good place to start if you want to open up new stores or hold events, or are just looking for places to visit.

I measure active users by counting both local residents and hypergrid visitors. After all, hypergrid visitors attend events and spend money just like anybody else. If I’m looking for a happening grid, I want one with a lot of people on it — and I don’t really care where their home avatar is based. In fact, several grids are encouraging users to have their avatars on other grids, such as Kitely or OSgrid, in order to reduce the load on their own servers. Many grid owners are also increasingly willing to rent land to visitors, and even give free store space and homes to visitors as well. Their money, after all, is just as good.

Yes, this means that people are double-counted, based on all the grids they visit. But they’d also be double-counted if they created new avatars on each grid. So it comes out even in the end.

Here some information on how and why you should set up a stats page for your grid. Of course, not all grids need a stats page, especially grids that aren’t open to the public, like school grids, private company grids, small family grids, and so on. From prior surveys, this “dark metaverse” of OpenSim grids might actually be bigger than the one we know about, because those grids don’t need to promote themselves, and we never hear about them.

Kitely Market update

According to Kitely co-founder and CEO Ilan Tochner, the Kitely Market has delivered to 353 OpenSim grids to date, both hypergrid-enabled and closed, private grids. (Instructions for how to configure the Kitely Market for closed grids are here.)

There are currently 15,056 product listings in Kitely Market, with a total of 30,341 different product variations, of which 25,345 are exportable.

The Kitely Market passed the 30,000 item milestone in May.

Transitions

Moonlight Grid suspended operations since this time last month. It was one of the few OpenSim grids running the Halcyon fork of the software.

“As you have noticed we have disappeared. The Halcyon Developers have promised a ‘Glorious Future’ and we anxiously await that future, however, we feel that right at this moment Halcyon isn’t the right fit for us,” the grid owners said in a statement on the website. “Don’t get me wrong, Halcyon is a SUPERB piece of software and runs great. Our stuff just works right out of the box in it. Sure it can be a bit of a beast to install and maintain but so is a Porsche or Jaguar. We need to consider a lot of things in order to decide which simulator is right for us at this time. There are a few options out there, some good, some bad. We are also working on other endeavors and projects that would benefit from an already populated grid. We do plan
on establishing a grid presence, whether it be self hosted or part of another established grid we have yet to decide.”

Halcyon is a version of OpenSim that was open sourced by the now-defunct InWorldz grid in 2015.

“Our Discord Channel remains open so that you may keep in touch with us and we may provide updates on our projects and grid decisions,” the grid said. “For the moment you can find us in DigiWorldz on Lunar and on Creo Mundos in the Commercial Area.”

There are four other Halcyon grids in our database, including Amaryllis Grid, 3D Worldz, Avequest, and Creo Mundos.

Halcyon does not currently support hypergrid travel, so the grids are only accessible to people who create local user accounts.

We have seven new grids in our database this month, including the Brazilian 3D Love grid, Mysterious Grid 2, 3D Worldz, Avequest, Virtual Dream Grid, ArtDestiny, and Orchid Heights.

Top 40 grids by land area

The list below is a small subset of existing OpenSim grids. We are now tracking a total of 1,447 different publicly-accessible grids, 305 of which were active this month, and 237 of which published their statistics.

All region counts on this list are, whenever available, in terms of standard region equivalents. Active user counts include hypergrid visitors whenever possible.

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.

Below are the 40 largest grids by total land area, in terms of standard region equivalents.

Maria Korolov
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