OpenSim starts new year with record high land area

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The total land area on OpenSim’s public grids reached the equivalent of 131,511 standard regions this month, an all-time high, on an increase of more than 1,000 standard regions compared to last month. However, the total number of active users went down by over 3,500.

Part of the decrease was due to the fact that the OpenSim Community Conference was last month, driving up those numbers. A few grids also failed to report stats this month, or had outages, or closed, but nothing major — for the most part, the decrease was due to lower numbers across the board, possibly due to the winter holidays.

Scaling back for 2024

You might notice that this article is substantially shorter than previous’ months. I’m scaling back my OpenSim coverage this year to make more time for other projects. If you have a press release, you can send it to me, but the closer it is to publishable format, the quicker I’ll be able to post it on the site.

I’m now tracking a total of 2,653 public grids, of which 334 are active and 258 published their statistics this month. If you have a stats page that we’re not tracking, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com — that way, your grid will be mentioned in this report every month, for additional visibility with both search engines and users.

Monthly OpenSim land area counts. (Hypergrid Business data October 2023.)

Our stats do not include many of the grids running on DreamGrid which is a distribution 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. 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.

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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: 5,155 active users
  2. Wolf Territories Grid: 4,715 active users
  3. DigiWorldz: 2,196 active users
  4. GBG World: 2,081 active users
  5. Alternate Metaverse: 1,837 active users
  6. WaterSplash: 1,354 active users
  7. Darkheart’s Playground: 1,342 active users
  8. Moonrose: 1,138 active users
  9. Littlefield: 1,036 active users
  10. Trianon World: 917 active users
  11. AviWorlds: 897 active users
  12. Neverworld: 887 active users
  13. Party Destination Grid: 804 active users
  14. Craft World: 685 active users
  15. Eureka World: 683 active users
  16. Astralia: 657 active users
  17. Jungle Friends Grid: 621 active users
  18. Kitely: 611 active users
  19. German World Grid: 605 active users
  20. AvatarLife: 577 active users
  21. Herederos Grid: 571 active users
  22. Vivo Sim: 547 active users
  23. Vida Dupla: 534 active users
  24. ProxyNet: 469 active users
  25. ZetaWorlds: 460 active users

 

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.

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.

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 maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

Maria Korolov
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