April stats all up despite outages

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All OpenSim stats are up this month. The total land area of the public OpenSim grids increased by more than 1,000 regions, to 100,880, while the active users increased by more than 3,000, to 43,272.

Creatrix World, which reported more than 700 regions last month, is currently recovering from a server crash, and The Social Mouse is down for maintenance and reported a large drop in active users. In addition, the Great Canadian Grid did not report its land area stats this month, and Tag Grid did not report its active users.

We are now tracking a total of 1,748 grids, 361 of which are active, out of which 297 had their stats reported this month.

This month, OSgrid was the biggest gainer of land area, with the equivalent of 947 new regions, followed by Furry World with 424, Serenity with 275, Alternate Metaverse with 138, and AviTron with 75 new regions.

OSgrid is also the largest grid in terms of land area, with a total of 36,500 standard region equivalents followed by Kitely with 18,942, ZetaWorlds with 7,646, Alternate Metaverse: with 5,875, and Discovery Grid with 5,873 regions. Scroll down to the bottom of this article and see the list of 40 largest grids by land area.

Total regions, in standard region equivalents, on public OpenSim grids, as of April 2022. (Hypergrid Business data.)

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 five 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:

  1. OSgrid: 3,873 active users
  2. AviTron: 2,244 active users
  3. DigiWorldz: 2,113 active users
  4. Metropolis: 1,774 active users
  5. AviWorlds: 1,485 active users
  6. ZetaWorlds: 1,484 active users
  7. Kitely: 1,456 active users
  8. Alternate Metaverse: 1,293 active users
  9. GBG World: 1,052 active users
  10. Eureka World: 952 active users
  11. Party Destination Grid: 938 active users
  12. Exo-Life: 917 active users
  13. Craft World: 913 active users
  14. Neverworld: 876 active users
  15. The City: 772 active users
  16. Little Breath: 710 active users
  17. Dorena’s World: 658 active users
  18. Soul Grid: 644 active users
  19. Astralia: 640 active users
  20. DreamNation: 552 active users
  21. Free Life: 512 active users
  22. Arkham Grid: 498 active users
  23. Freedom Grid: 494 active users
  24. Barefoot Dreamers: 489 active users
  25. Fire and Ice Grid: 479 active users

Since last month, AviTron gained the highest number of active users with an increase of 720 actives, Fire and Ice Grid with 479, VirtuaWorld with 447, Alternate Metaverse with 261, and Dorena’s World with 255 new actives. Full details are available on this month’s full grid stats report page.

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 19,469 product listings in Kitely Market, containing 38,600 product variations, 33,469 of which are sold with the Export permission.

(Kitely Market Data.)
Kitely Market has delivered orders to 543 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.

Help Cream The Rabbit find Easter eggs

(Image courtesy Mobius grid.)

Cream The Rabbit is searching for missing Easter eggs in the ongoing Easter egg hunt at the Green Hill Zone region of the Mobius grid, and is inviting  you to help out in the in-world search. Starting on the Easter weekend on Sunday, April 17, you will be helping The Cream find 12 Easter eggs by April 30.

“When you approach Cream she will start talking to you,” grid head Serra Royale told Hypergrid Business. “Click the hyperlinks appearing as underlined text in the messages she sends to continue the dialogue. You may need to right click the hyperlinks and click Run this Command on some viewers.”

In this hunt game, you will need to click the eggs when you find them.

The hypergrid address is main.mobiusgrid.us:80:Green Hill Zone.

Happy Easter!

Mobius grid has also redesigned the region by replacing most of the prim builds with optimized mesh that features improved textures.

Dereos grid celebrates Easter this Sunday

The PSSMG Paradise region of the Dereos grid will host an Easter Fire 2022 event at 8 p.m. Pacific time on Sunday, April 17 featuring Easter tunes with DJ Dereos, Ly and Aki. There also will be decorations and surprises.

The hypergrid address is dereos.org:80:PSSMG Paradise.

Easter decoration ideas at the Soul Grid

(Image courtesy Soul-Ostara.)

Looking for some Easter season decoration ideas? Soul-Ostara region of the Soul Grid has some fantastic ideas you can consider this season.

The hypergrid address is soul-grid.de:8002:Soul-Ostara.

Easter eggs at Encantada

(Image courtesy Encantada.)

Need some Easter decorated eggs for your region or virtual world? The Encantada region of the OSgrid — which always houses free mesh items for home and garden — has some eggs some that you can use as is or with modification. The textures are included in the Peter Rabbit Egg.

The hypergrid address is hg.osgrid.org:80:Encantada.

Neverworld has a new continent area and free parcels

Neverworld grid now has a new continent area comprising of 37 regions currently but to be expanded shortly. The grid is also offering free water island parcels parcels at The Keys, Mariner’s Bay, and North and South Bay Estates. The free parcels range from 10,000 square meters to over 70,000 square meters in size, said grid owner Govega Sachertorte.

“We have a lot of exciting things happening soon including a collaboration with a major music or art talent, which will bring a whole new level of users to our grid and spaces, including live concert venues,” she told Hypergrid Business.

New grids

The following grids were added to our database this month: Cooperation Creative, Maze of The Mind, Nautika, and Victoria Lane.

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 1,748 different publicly-accessible grids, 361 of which were active this month, and 297 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.

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