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.
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.
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:
- OSgrid: 5,155 active users
- Wolf Territories Grid: 4,715 active users
- DigiWorldz: 2,196 active users
- GBG World: 2,081 active users
- Alternate Metaverse: 1,837 active users
- WaterSplash: 1,354 active users
- Darkheart’s Playground: 1,342 active users
- Moonrose: 1,138 active users
- Littlefield: 1,036 active users
- Trianon World: 917 active users
- AviWorlds: 897 active users
- Neverworld: 887 active users
- Party Destination Grid: 804 active users
- Craft World: 685 active users
- Eureka World: 683 active users
- Astralia: 657 active users
- Jungle Friends Grid: 621 active users
- Kitely: 611 active users
- German World Grid: 605 active users
- AvatarLife: 577 active users
- Herederos Grid: 571 active users
- Vivo Sim: 547 active users
- Vida Dupla: 534 active users
- ProxyNet: 469 active users
- 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.
- Wolf Territories Grid: 28,960 regions
- OSgrid: 25,345 regions
- Kitely: 18,262 regions
- ZetaWorlds: 11,723 regions
- Alternate Metaverse: 10,071 regions
- Groovy Verse: 6,422 regions
- Discovery Grid: 5,128 regions
- DigiWorldz: 3,563 regions
- German World Grid: 2,178 regions
- Tag Grid: 1,480 regions
- Shoalwater Bay: 1,072 regions
- GBG World: 954 regions
- Virtual Worlds Grid: 916 regions
- ArtDestiny: 900 regions
- 3rd Rock Grid: 872 regions
- Friends Grid: 816 regions
- AviWorlds: 811 regions
- Kinky Haven: 653 regions
- CandM World: 628 regions
- Littlefield: 514 regions
- AvatarLife: 500 regions
- GorGrid: 430 regions
- DreamNation: 393 regions
- Craft World: 388 regions
- Furry World: 372 regions
- Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
- EdMondo: 298 regions
- Neverworld: 293 regions
- Open Virtual Worlds: 241 regions
- Japan Open Grid: 194 regions
- Counter Earth: 182 regions
- Adreans-World: 173 regions
- Kater and Friends: 160 regions
- MisFitz Grid: 157 regions
- Outworldz: 150 regions
- German World: 144 regions
- https://canadiangrid.ca/: 144 regions
- GerGrid: 140 regions
- OpenSim Fest: 140 regions
- Galactic Virtual: 127 regions
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.
