The total number of active users was up quite a bit this month, but total land area and registered users dropped slightly. The loss of 144 standard region equivalents and 1,141 registered users was more than accounted for by the fact that FrancoGrid had server issues and didn’t report its stats this month and Russia based Caprica also didn’t report stats.
Last month FrancoGrid had nearly 8,000 registered users last month, 51 regions, and 88 active users. Caprica had 306 regions last month and 162 active users.
Overall OpenSim gained nearly 2,000 active users last month.
Fire and Ice grid didn’t report active users this month following an internally performed database rectification that came along with an interruption to stats reporting. Last month they had more than 400 active users.
The system checks for logins within 30 days and will self-heal, said grid CEO Sara Payne.
“There were a number of users showing a last login date of zero,” she told Hypergrid Business. “I forcibly updated to a current unix time stamp.”
OSgrid remains the most expansive spanning a total of 35,553 regions, followed by Kitely 18,937, ZetaWorlds 7,643, Discovery Grid 5,810, and Alternate Metaverse 5,737 regions. These are not necessarily the ones that earned the highest number of regions this month. The top five region earners this month are Tomi’s World with 192, Alternate Metaverse 168, GBG World 152, German World Grid 86, and MisFitz Grid with 84 new regions.
These stats do not include most of the grids running on OutWorldz DreamGrid, which is a distribution of OpenSim used by many people to create virtual worlds on personal computers, private company grids, or school grids.
DreamGrid lets anyone create a small home grid on their computer easily through a graphical interface and one-click install feature. The software is free to download and use. Customers can use it to easily and quickly manage their grids using graphical interfaces. They can add new regions, ban users, delete regions, auto restart and shut down entire grid or unoccupied regions to save computing power, and track usage stats.
Outworldz DreamGrids have access to 170 free OpenSim Archives, with 5 more in the works.
The Hyperica events listing also lists current and future online events directly published to OpenSim viewers. According to OutWorlds and DreamGrid owner Fred Beckhusen, the Hyperica grid crawler software is tracking a total of 6,639 objects including 5,796 DreamGrids and 505 other grids.
OpenSim is a free, open-source virtual world platform similar to Second Life that allows people with no technical skills to quickly and cheaply create virtual worlds, and to 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.
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:
- OSgrid: 4,804 active users
- DigiWorldz: 2,070 active users
- Metropolis: 1,641 active users
- AviTron: 1,524 active users
- ZetaWorlds: 1,459 active users
- AviWorlds: 1,393 active users
- Kitely: 1,263 active users
- GBG World: 1,046 active users
- Alternate Metaverse: 1,032 active users
- Eureka World: 1,019 active users
- Party Destination Grid: 954 active users
- Exo-Life: 910 active users
- Neverworld: 785 active users
- Craft World: 704 active users
- Little Breath: 622 active users
- The City: 571 active users
- DreamNation: 554 active users
- Astralia: 547 active users
- Free Life: 532 active users
- Moonrose: 509 active users
- Soul Grid: 463 active users
- Arkham Grid: 444 active users
- Barefoot Dreamers: 422 active users
- Freedom Grid: 409 active users
- Dorena’s World: 403 active users
The above are the top 25 grids in terms of total active users over 30 days. We compared this figure with the previous month’s tally for each grid to generate a list of most active grids or a list of grids that gained most active users in the last 30 days.
The above, however, are not necessarily the most active grids in terms of number of active users gained during the past month. This month Twisted Grid beat all the rest in terms of user acquisition at 353 new users, followed by Eureka World 317, AviTron 287, German World Grid 225, and Kitely 203 new users. Full details are available on this month’s grid stats link.
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, hold events, or are just looking for places to visit.
Here’s some information on how and why you should set up a stats page for your grid. 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.
Online marketplaces for OpenSim content
There are currently 19,432 product listings in Kitely Market, containing 38,568 product variations, 33,431 of which are sold with the export permission.
Kitely Market has delivered orders to 540 OpenSim grids to date, which includes both public grids listed here as well as private grids that are not accessible to the public, don’t report their stats, and don’t make it into our reports.
The Kitely Market is the largest collection of 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.
As seen from the above chart, nearly all the growth on Kitely Market has been in content that can be exported to other grids — that is the green area in the chart. The red area, of non-exportable content, has stayed level for the past five years.
Offering a convenient and low-cost way for OpenSim users to buy legitimate, legal content not only offers creators sales opportunities that they wouldn’t have otherwise but reduces the need for pirated content, similar to the way that Netflix and other streaming services have reduced the amount of illegal video streaming.
In addition, restricting content to closed grids does little to stop piracy. Most stolen content is ripped from Second Life, the original closed grid. The only time that being on a closed grid offers additional security for content creators is when the content involves high-end scripts or proprietary animations.
Speaking of closed grids — where users are not able to teleport to other grids — the biggest such grid, Tag, also has its own online marketplace.
The Tag grid marketplace, the only other OpenSim marketplace comparable to the Kitely Market, also lists apparel, avatar accessories, avatar appearances and other items. From the marketplace website, anyone is able to list their products or items on the marketplace to promote them either for sale or as a freebie, but the content can only be purchased and used within the Tag grid and can’t be taken or delivered to other grids.
OpenSim grids uninterrupted by sanctions
We didn’t find any OpenSim grid that has been closed as a result of sanctions against Russia or the war in Ukraine. Owners of Sacrarium and Caprica OpenSim grids, for instance, told Hypergrid Business that they are working normally despite sanctions. Most grids do not have an official statement about whether they support Ukraine or Russia, but quite a number of OpenSim grids have expressed support for Ukraine and condemned the war.
Caprica grid is openly supporting Russia following the invasion of Ukraine and according to a March 1 post on its website, the grid fully supports the action to denazify and demilitarize Ukraine.
Littlefield to celebrate 9th birthday next month
Littlefield Grid will host its 9th birthday anniversary party on Saturday, April 2 in the grid’s special birthday region. The event will feature live performers and a dance. The grid is also giving free regions to and inviting anyone who wants to build anything for exhibition during the entire month of April following the celebrations.
The grid will also celebrate St. Patrick’s Day on March 17, and Easter Sunday and Monday on Apr 17 and 18 respectively.
The hypergrid addess is lfgrid.com:8002.
FrancoGrid no more after server host failure
FrancoGrid has disappeared following a breakdown of Scaleway Online company servers where the grid was hosted. The data on the servers cannot be retrieved. Customers are invited to retrieve any Dedibackup service linked to the servers by the end of this month since the backup services will also be removed then. The host was unwilling to resolve the problem and thus the grid cannot rebuild said Cherry Manga, the grid’s owner. However, the association still remains and on standby.
“Assets are lost after 2020, assets from before 2020 are safe,” he said. “Our technical admin is thinking about a solution to provide .iar to people who want them. For any information, please contact ssm by email at contact@francogrid.org.”
The team is working on refunding money paid for hosting for the month of February.
For any information regarding cash, or for paid hosting to mount simulators on the grid of your choice, please contact Nino by email at fgagod@gmail.com.”
DreamGrid Version 5 releases this coming weekend
The current operational version of OutWorld’s DreamGrid is 4.99 but Version 5 will be released this weekend. The update is coming following a last minute change to the Text-To-Speech feature which lets users convert text to a female or male sound as they wish. It can be used to convert typed text into sound files for uploading or using in scripts in a grid.
“It makes mp3 files on demand that play with media on a prim and makes uploadable .wav files for scripted use,” OutWorldz and DreamGrid’s CEO Beckhusen told Hypergrid Business. “I added a bunch of these voices to my region this weekend and found a bug when I did it.”
The bug has since been fixed.
People using the DreamGrid software can do an optional update to the latest version through an update notice that will pop up when the software opens. The software now has a Smart Suspend mode that suspends unoccupied regions automatically. This reduces their CPU usage to 0% but leaves them some memory just in case someone teleports there. They are swapped to disk when memory is needed for other regions.
“Teleports are almost instant as if the region is always on,” said Beckhusen.
Mal Ban is back
The Mal Ban’s Hypergrid Safari is back and will be visiting the OutWorldz grid to close the first season and the team will then meet with Diva Canto on her University grid to talk about the future of OpenSim.
JokaydiaGrid goes offline
JokaydiaGrid is now permanently closed following a natural phasing out since 2020 when the public side of the grid was closed. The grid was no longer necessary as some of the larger services like Kitely and Dreamland now provide good options for educators who want to use a public virtual space, grid owner Jo Kay said.
“My work has always focused on virtual spaces and their use in education, and progressed to mostly Minecraft projects,” she told Hypergrid Business.”
Get a free parcel and start building for the OpenSim Fest exhibition
OpenSim Fest — a festival that celebrates creative talents on virtual worlds — will run from July 8 to 25 this year. Building on the host OpenSim Fest grid is expected to be complete on June 30. There also will be a preview party on July 1 and build testing from July 2 to 7. The event is hosted by the Infinite Metaverse Alliance.
The organizers, who include entertainers, merchants, tech architects, code maintainers, and graphic artists, are offering free parcels for exhibitors and merchants to start building their exhibits. To get a free parcel, contact the organizers via Facebook, Twitter, or their Discord group. Musicians, DJs, poets, and entertainers wishing to perform at the event can also contact the organizers. The group is also calling for sponsors and volunteers to join them in hosting the event.
New grids
The following grids were added to our database this month: Continuum, Dark Sim, Migrating Coconuts, Neros, NewOffworld, XTalent.
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 david@hypergridbusiness.com.
Top 40 grids by land area
The list below is a small subset of existing OpenSim grids. We are now tracking a total of 1,744 different publicly-accessible grids, 369 of which were active this month, and 293 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.
- OSgrid: 35,553 regions
- Kitely: 18,936 regions
- ZetaWorlds: 7,648 regions
- Discovery Grid: 5,810 regions
- Alternate Metaverse: 5,737 regions
- DigiWorldz: 4,113 regions
- Tag Grid: 1,484 regions
- 3rd Rock Grid: 1,165 regions
- GorGrid: 1,009 regions
- Virtual Worlds Grid: 914 regions
- Metropolis: 854 regions
- Creatrix World: 735 regions
- AviWorlds: 708 regions
- Tomi’s World: 676 regions
- Serenity: 625 regions
- Wyldwood Bayou: 565 regions
- GBG World: 540 regions
- Kinky Haven: 493 regions
- HD Skin World: 461 regions
- Craft World: 455 regions
- Littlefield: 447 regions
- Wolf Territories Grid: 443 regions
- Furry World: 424 regions
- Tangle Grid: 409 regions
- Counter Earth: 352 regions
- Neverworld: 348 regions
- Encitra Home Grid: 335 regions
- DreamNation: 328 regions
- ArtDestiny: 324 regions
- Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
- EdMondo: 275 regions
- AviTron: 237 regions
- GerGrid: 235 regions
- Open Virtual Worlds: 232 regions
- Adreans-World: 197 regions
- 3rd Life Grid: 179 regions
- Soul Grid: 172 regions
- German World Grid: 149 regions
- Japan Open Grid: 146 regions
- German World: 144 regions
- OpenSim active users hit all-time-high for the holidays - December 15, 2023
- OpenSim user activity ramping up for the holidays - November 15, 2023
- OpenSim land area at a new high as grids prep for holidays - October 15, 2023