OpenSim active users rise with cooler weather

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This time of year — in the northern hemisphere, at least — people start spending more time inside as temperatures drop and school starts.

So it’s no surprise that the total number of active users on the public OpenSim grids is going up.

According to their published stats report, there were 44,129 actives this up, up by 1,128 from this time a month ago.

However, the total land area went down, by the equivalent of 738 standard regions. All of that drop — and then some — is accounted for by the fact that a single grid, CandM World, didn’t report its stats this month. Last month, it had over 1,800 regions. Today, the website just shows a security error message, so it could just be a configuration error.

We are now tracking a total of 2,675 public grids, of which 311 are active and 244 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.

This month, OSgrid was the largest grid by land area, with 34,103 standard region equivalents, while Wolf Territories Grid was the most active, with 6,950 unique logins over the past 30 days.

OpenSim land area for Sep. 2024. (Hypergrid Business data.).

Our stats do not include most of the grids running on DreamGrid, a free easy-to-use version 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. Wolf Territories Grid: 6,950 active users
  2. OSgrid: 4,894 active users
  3. GBG World: 2,422 active users
  4. DigiWorldz: 2,143 active users
  5. Darkheart’s Playground: 2,018 active users
  6. Alternate Metaverse: 1,789 active users
  7. WaterSplash: 1,491 active users
  8. AviWorlds: 1,101 active users
  9. AviVerse AlterEgo: 1,024 active users
  10. Trianon World: 1,004 active users
  11. Neverworld: 953 active users
  12. Moonrose: 861 active users
  13. Littlefield: 858 active users
  14. Party Destination Grid: 792 active users
  15. Craft World: 790 active users
  16. Astralia: 717 active users
  17. AvatarLife: 638 active users
  18. Herederos Grid: 566 active users
  19. Groovy Verse: 564 active users
  20. SunEden Resort: 552 active users
  21. Great Canadian Grid: 550 active users
  22. Gentle Fire Grid: 496 active users
  23. Kitely: 495 active users
  24. Virtual Vista Metaverse: 456 active users
  25. ZetaWorlds: 437 active users

Online marketplaces for OpenSim content

There are currently 21,019 product listings in Kitely Market containing 41,133 product variations, 35,892 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 630 OpenSim grids to date.

(Data courtesy Kitely.)

As you can see in the above chart, nearly all the growth in Kitely Market has been in content that can be exported to other grids — that is the green area on the graph. The red area, of non-exportable content, has stayed level for the past eight years.

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.

New grids

I didn’t add any new grids to the database this month.

If you know of any public grid that we’re missing, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

Suspended grids

The following 12 grids were suspended this month: BachmansWorld One, CatGrid, DigiGrids, German Grid, Legacy, Mathesis, Matrix, NewOffworld, Oczko, SFgrid, Steg, and Trinity’s DreamGrid/

If they don’t reappear online again soon, they will be marked as closed in future reports.

Sometimes, a grid changes its login URI or website address — if that’s the case, email me and let me know and I’ll update my database.

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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