OpenSim area continues growth streak

The total land area on OpenSim’s public grids reached the equivalent of 133,076 standard regions this month, an all-time high — and the third month in a row that OpenSim land area has broken records.

There was an increase of 1,196 standard region equivalents compared to last month. Meanwhile, the total number of registered users went up by nearly 2,000. The number of active users fell by just over 500, partly due to grid outages. ProxyNet, for example, which reported over 400 active users last month, was down this month. And another grid that reported a drop of more than 500 active may have had database issues — Vivo Sim

I’m now tracking a total of 2,655 public grids, of which 309 were active, and 245 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.

Also, I’m no longer sending out a monthly email blast reminding OpenSim grid owners to send me news and updates for this report. If you have news, please email me before the tenth of the month if you want a short item included in this monthly wrap-up. For longer news, feel free to send me press releases at any time.

OpenSim land area for March 2024. (Hypergrid Business Data.).

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.

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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: 5,276 active users
  2. Wolf Territories Grid: 5,271 active users
  3. GBG World: 2,221 active users
  4. DigiWorldz: 2,138 active users
  5. Alternate Metaverse: 1,971 active users
  6. Darkheart’s Playground: 1,634 active users
  7. WaterSplash: 1,342 active users
  8. AvatarLife: 1,196 active users
  9. Moonrose: 1,111 active users
  10. Littlefield: 1,000 active users
  11. Neverworld: 989 active users
  12. AviWorlds: 972 active users
  13. Party Destination Grid: 879 active users
  14. Vida Dupla: 864 active users
  15. Trianon World: 848 active users
  16. Craft World: 750 active users
  17. Astralia: 678 active users
  18. Eureka World: 658 active users
  19. Kitely: 650 active users
  20. Virtualife: 618 active users
  21. The City: 553 active users
  22. Little Big City: 553 active users
  23. Resurgence: 550 active users
  24. Jungle Friends Grid: 518 active users
  25. Herederos Grid: 511 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