OpenSim’s land area and active users all increased this month as OSgrid came back online and many other grids reported increased land area and user numbers.
The public metaverse gained the equivalent of 8,438 standard-sized regions this month, and 1,684 active users for a new total of 153,858 regions and 49,690 actives. That’s the highest number of reported active users since we began tracking these numbers in 2009.
The biggest gainers this month were OSgrid and Wolf Territories Grid, which both grew in active users and in land area.
I don’t usually post the active users chart, but I wanted to show it to you guys this month so you can see the trends — and the fact that we’re inching very close to the 50,000 number.
Maybe it’s the heat? I don’t blame people for staying inside, out of the sun. Under a fan, or, if they’re lucky, air conditioning.
And here’s the chart that normally accompanies my monthly stats articles. This one is just for the land area, in standard region equivalents.
The following grids were added to our database this month: Australia, Chez Nous, Disaster Land, Eczeat, Enchanted Realms, Harmonys Haven, Hispanofur, NeonWorld, New Life, Novalandia, and Unknown.
The following 12 grids were suspended this month: Andretti Estates, Arielle’s Grid, Endless Grid, EscapeLands, Life RPG World, Littlefield, Mysterious Grid 2, Phantom Rose, Planet Jikan, ProxyNet, Tedesco Sim’s, and XTAL.
If these grids do not come back online within the next month or two, I’ll mark them as closed.
Our stats do not include most of the grids running on DreamGrid, a free, easy-to-use version 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. If you offer region rentals and are not on this list, email me!
You can 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:
- Wolf Territories Grid: 13,159 active users
- OSgrid: 3,618 active users
- GBG World: 2,523 active users
- Alternate Metaverse: 2,095 active users
- DigiWorldz: 1,985 active users
- Darkheart’s Playground: 1,474 active users
- Cave Grid: 1,300 active users
- Sciattisi Grid: 1,261 active users
- Neverworld: 1,180 active users
- Sanctum Astra: 939 active users
- New Life Italy: 917 active users
- Trianon World: 914 active users
- AviWorlds: 796 active users
- AvatarLife: 769 active users
- Friends Grid: 724 active users
- Party Destination Grid: 720 active users
- BloodMoon: 697 active users
- Craft World: 662 active users
- MK3: 597 active users
- SpaceGrid: 508 active users
- Free Life: 420 active users
- Virtualife: 396 active users
- Jungle Friends Grid: 395 active users
- ZetaWorlds: 365 active users
- Astralia: 363 active users
3rd Rock Grid is coming back
3rd Rock Grid, one of the oldest grids in OpenSim, is coming back.
The grid shut down in 2024, and many of its former residents found new homes on ZetaWorlds.
But now its original owner and founder, Terry Ford, is bringing it back to life.
“3rd Rock Grid has meant a lot to me and many others over the years, and with the history and the many firsts, I just had to bring it back,” he told Hypergrid Business.
Read the full story here.
OSgrid back up, celebrating 19th birthday
OSgrid has recovered from its recent month-long outage and is getting ready to celebrate its 19th birthday.
The party will run from July 20 to July 26 on the Event Plaza region on OSgrid, hypergrid address hg.osgrid.org:80:event plaza.
Read more about it here.
Despite the outage, OSgrid is already back to its position as the second-largest grid by both land area and active user counts.
Adult Life quits the hypergrid
In a profanity-laced announcement posted at the end of June, Adult Life announced that it is ending hypergrid connectivity for visitors to the grid.
“We will no longer tolerate the primitive, intrusive, and disrespectful behavior of some OpenSim users,” the grid said. “For this reason, we have completely blocked incoming teleports to the Hypergrid as of today.
The grid is also taking down its listings on OpenSimWorld, the hypergrid’s most popular source of information about OpenSim destinations and events.
The announcement didn’t explain what these specific behaviors were, but did say that “Anyone who thinks they can put pressure on us, intimidate us, or impose their moral garbage on us is sorely mistaken.”
In its description of what the grid is about, Adult Life says: “We create spaces for adults who seek more than the standard, stagnation, and pre-defined rules,” and, “In our grid, you’ll find us 99.9% unclothed.”
And they say that their motto is: “Clothing is not a sign of decency.”
Adult Life does not publish its monthly statistics, so its exit from the hypergrid doesn’t affect our monthly numbers, but my condolences go out to everyone who wants to enjoy some adult nudity and now has to create a new account on the grid. Here’s the registration link.
Online marketplaces for OpenSim content
As of May, there are 21,950 product listings in Kitely Market, containing 42,783 product variations, of which 37,475 are exportable, according to Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner.
Kitely Market has delivered orders to 689 OpenSim grids to date.
That’s an increase of ten grids compared to last month — and a drop of ten product listings. According to Tochner, the small drop is part of the natural ebb and flow of OpenSim businesses.
“The OpenSim community is quite old, and that leads to people eventually passing away or having physical issues that prevent them from being able to continue managing their accounts without assistance,” he told Hypergrid Business. “That leads to some stores shutting down each year. In most months, this is offset by new or existing stores adding more product listings than those that have been disabled. This month, the number of new listings was slightly lower than the number of listings that were removed, so the net effect was a slight decrease.”
Historically, all the Kitely Market growth has been in exportable content. This means that buyers can have their purchases delivered directly to avatar inventories on other grids, and that they can travel to other grids with the content.
In the early days of OpenSim, many creators considered this to be a security risk, and non-exportable content dominated. But creators quickly realized that most copybotted content actually comes from Second Life, where everything is non-exportable. And, in general, copybot tools and content thieves don’t bother to check item permissions before committing their thefts. Instead, allowing people to purchase exported content legally, conveniently, and at reasonable prices destroys the copybot economy entirely, leaving only a handful of freebie stores on grids that haven’t yet noticed that they exist and taken them down.
Another source of legitimate content on OpenSim is Linda Kellie’s products, and those of other creators that give them away for free under Creative Commons and similar licenses. Many official freebie stores on OpenSim grids offer these products.
This is similar to how Netflix and other low-cost and free streaming services dramatically reduced online movie piracy.
The Kitely Market is the largest collection of commercial 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.
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.
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.
There were a total of 329 active grids this month, 241 of which published statistics. I’m currently tracking a total of 2,151 grids.
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.
- Wolf Territories Grid: 34,041 regions
- OSgrid: 25,894 regions
- Groovy Verse: 18,081 regions
- Kitely: 17,645 regions
- ZetaWorlds: 17,098 regions
- Alternate Metaverse: 12,022 regions
- Neverworld: 3,256 regions
- DigiWorldz: 2,535 regions
- GBG World: 1,929 regions
- Discovery Grid: 1,614 regions
- Tag Grid: 1,577 regions
- Friends Grid: 1,481 regions
- ArtDestiny: 1,369 regions
- Virtual Worlds Grid: 910 regions
- Exotic Realities: 760 regions
- Kinky Haven: 689 regions
- Craft World: 662 regions
- AviWorlds: 651 regions
- New Life Italy: 636 regions
- AvatarLife: 634 regions
- Virtual Worlds Zone: 562 regions
- Darkheart’s Playground: 427 regions
- Furry World: 358 regions
- EdMondo: 310 regions
- BloodMoon: 287 regions
- Migrating Coconuts: 247 regions
- Open Virtual Worlds: 241 regions
- Spartans Keep: 218 regions
- MisFitz Grid: 215 regions
- Japan Open Grid: 201 regions
- Funny Rides: 193 regions
- Maze of The Mind: 187 regions
- Sense Limits: 185 regions
- Kater and Friends: 175 regions
- I Love You Grid: 175 regions
- Adreans-World: 171 regions
- Dynamic Worldz: 170 regions
- Utopia Skye: 138 regions
- GerGrid: 132 regions
- SpaceGrid: 132 regions
Do you know of any other grids that are open to the public but that I don’t have in my database? Email me at (email protected).
