OpenSim land area hits new record high as all stats rise this month

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OpenSim land area is up by more than 12,000 standard regions this month compared to last month, bringing the total land area to a record high of 113,151 standard region equivalents.

The growth happened despite some grid outages and closures. In particular, four French grids have shut down over the course of the past two months. Much of the increase in land area is due to Wolf Territories Grid, where 722 four-by-four variable-sized regions add up to the equivalent of 11,552 standard-sized regions.

The number of registered users is also up by more than 16,000, mostly due to the Tag Grid now reporting this data.

Logicamp, which had 281 actives and 112 regions last month is down this month and did not report stats. The Social Mouse is also down. Creatrix World is still restoring user accounts and inventories following a severe crash and has not been accepting new residents.

We are now tracking a total of 1,756 grids, 366 of which are active, out of which 286 had their stats reported this month.

Wolf Territories Grid showed the biggest land area growth this month with 11,041 standard region equivalents in the course of the last 30 days, followed by Alternate Metaverse 1,373, OSgrid with 441, ZetaWorlds with 150, Kinky Haven with 132, AviTron with 103 additional regions. Discovery Grid has lost the most land area at 227 regions, followed by Serenity at 171, and Kitely at 114 regions.

OpenSim metaverse land area is now at its most expansive in history. (Hypergrid Business Data.).

OSgrid is the largest OpenSim grid in terms of land area with a total of 36,941 regions, followed by Kitely with 18,828, Wolf Territories Grid with 11,552, ZetaWorlds with 7,796, Alternate Metaverse with 7,248, and Discovery Grid with 5,646 regions. Scroll down to the bottom of this article and see the list of 40 largest grids by land area.

These stats do not include most of the grids running on OutWorldz DreamGrid, which is a distribution of OpenSim used by many people to create virtual worlds on personal computers, private company grids, or school grids.

DreamGrid lets anyone create a small home grid on their computer easily through a graphical interface and one-click install feature. The software is free to download and use. Customers can use it to easily and quickly manage their grids using graphical interfaces. They can add new regions, ban users, delete regions, auto restart and shut down entire grid or unoccupied regions to save computing power, and track usage stats.

Outworldz DreamGrids have access to over 170 free OpenSim Archives. The Hyperica events listing also lists current and future online events directly published to OpenSim viewers. So far, the Hyperica grid crawler software has tracked a total of 6,639 objects including 5,796 DreamGrids and 505 other grids as per their latest update. The total list of grids tracked by OutWorldz is available here. You can also add your grid in the stats if it is not being crawled by OutWorldz.

OpenSim is a free, open-source virtual world platform similar to Second Life that allows people with no technical skills to quickly and cheaply create virtual worlds, and to teleport to other virtual worlds. Those with technical skills can run OpenSim worlds on their own servers for free, while commercial hosting starts at less than $5 a region. A list of hosting providers is here. 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:

  1. OSgrid: 4,780 active users
  2. AviTron: 2,545 active users
  3. DigiWorldz: 2,036 active users
  4. Metropolis: 1,662 active users
  5. Kitely: 1,434 active users
  6. AviWorlds: 1,402 active users
  7. ZetaWorlds: 1,341 active users
  8. GBG World: 1,208 active users
  9. Alternate Metaverse: 1,152 active users
  10. Party Destination Grid: 949 active users
  11. Exo-Life: 918 active users
  12. The City: 885 active users
  13. Eureka World: 804 active users
  14. Little Breath: 798 active users
  15. Craft World: 765 active users
  16. Neverworld: 750 active users
  17. Dorena’s World: 674 active users
  18. Soul Grid: 670 active users
  19. Astralia: 565 active users
  20. Freedom Grid: 556 active users
  21. DreamNation: 540 active users
  22. Quintonia: 500 active users
  23. Free Life: 490 active users
  24. Arkham Grid: 472 active users
  25. Moonrose: 457 active users

The actives list is based on active, unique 30-day user login numbers that grids report on their stats pages. Those grids that don’t report their numbers might be just as popular, but we wouldn’t know.

These are the most popular grids as at now but aren’t necessarily the fastest growing in terms of new active users. OSgrid showed the most gains with 907 new active users followed by Twisted Grid with 300, Youth Nation with 294, AviTron with 293, GBG World with 148, and Continuum with 110 new active users.

The active user stats are also used to generate the popular hypergrid destinations list, which is useful if you have a hyperport and want to put up gates to the most popular grids, or include the most popular grids in an in-world directory. This list is also a good place to start if you want to open up new stores, hold events, or are just looking for places to visit.

Here’s some information on how and why you should set up a stats page for your grid. Not all grids need a stats page — especially grids that aren’t open to the public like school grids, private company grids, small family grids, and so on. From prior surveys, this dark metaverse of OpenSim grids might actually be bigger than the one we know about, because those grids don’t need to promote themselves, and we never hear about them.

Online marketplaces for OpenSim content

There are currently 19,539 product listings in the Kitely Market containing 38,670 product variations, of which 33,527 are sold with the export permission.
Exportables on Kitely market over time. (Kitely Market Data.)
Kitely Market has delivered orders to 551 OpenSim grids to date, which includes both public grids listed here as well as private grids that are not accessible to the public, don’t report their stats, and don’t make it into our reports.

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.

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

Offering a convenient and low-cost way for OpenSim users to buy legitimate, legal content not only offers creators sales opportunities that they wouldn’t have otherwise but reduces the need for pirated content, similar to the way that Netflix and other streaming services have reduced the amount of illegal video streaming.

In addition, restricting content to closed grids does little to stop piracy. Most stolen content is ripped from Second Life, the original closed grid. The only time that being on a closed grid offers additional security for content creators is when the content involves high-end scripts or proprietary animations.

Speaking of closed grids — where users are not able to teleport to other grids — the biggest such grid, Tag, also has its own online marketplace.

The Tag grid marketplace, the only other OpenSim marketplace comparable to the Kitely Market, also lists over 2,000 items including apparel, avatar accessories, avatar appearances and other items. From the marketplace’s website, anyone is able to list their products or items on the marketplace to promote them either for sale or as a freebie, but the content can only be purchased and used within the Tag grid and can’t be taken or delivered to other grids.

BritGrid offering affordable rental regions

BritGrid is continuing to offer affordable rentals and has increased prim allowance on all new and existing regions to 30,000 primitives free of charge, grid owner Mister BritGrid told Hypergrid Business.  The prices are as follows:

  • one region, measuring 256 square meters: £5.00 or US $6.13 per month
  • two-by-two varregion, measuring 512 square meters: £7.50 GBP or US $9.2
  • three-by-three varregion, measuring 768 square meters: £10.00 GBP or US $12.27

All purchases come with extra primitive options of 45,000 or 60,000 at £2.50 or $3.07 for each additional 15,000. There is a daily backup for OARs for all the regions, a choice of X or Y script engine, daily OAR backups, optional Gloebit currency , and optional Vivox voice.  There are no setup fees.

The hypergrid address is britgrid.com:8002.

Chez-Eden grid hosts event for French users in wake of shutdowns

Francogrid, Virtual Dream, Fibia Origin , and Neros have all closed down this month and their French-speaking users have scattered to other grids, said Chez-Eden grid owner Eden Cat.

To support these users, Chez-Eden is hosting an in-world gathering for French OpenSim users. Helping organize the event are Hicks Adder and Max Hill, known in-world as Ignis Faatus.

Most of these users lost their inventories and assets after these closures some of which were unexplained.

The first meeting of the kind will take place on Wednesday, June 1 on the Chez-Eden grid.

The hypergrid address is chez-eden.venez.fr:8002:Chez-Eden.

After that, the grid will be hosting monthly events, including technical talks, to help Francophones meet, help each other, and share information about OpenSim issues.

TanGle grid’s 10th birthday

TanGle grid will host a 10 year’s birthday celebration from 10 a.m. on June 6 at the Blue Moon Cafe on the Blue Moon region.

The event will feature DJ DJ Leslie with Classic Rock as well as balloons and dancing.

The hypergrid address is: tanglegrid.net:8002:bluemoon.

I Love You, an OpenSim region and social network, celebrates one year anniversary

The I Love You region on the the ZetaWorlds grid will host a birthday party from 8 p.m. Pacific Time on Sunday, May 22 at the Main Event Stage to celebrate turning one year old. The event will be seven hours of fun, music, dancing, and shows. There also will be fireworks at the end of the night.

The event is sponsored by the XusYou OpenSim grid and I Love You Social, a brand new adult social network like Facebook but only open to virtual lifers and which is created for all OpenSimmers. It is free to join and use. The network allows people to make friends, post anything they like, and advertise for free.

The hypergrid address is hg.zetaworlds.com:80:I Love You.

Pangea Art and Culture Festival 2022 ongoing

Terra Merhyem’s Excalibur. (Image courtesy Pangea grid.)

The hosts of Pangea grid’s Art and Culture Festival 2022 are calling for applications from any international or local German artists who would like to exhibits their art and culture at the festival. The applications should be submitted to info@pangea-grid.com or in-world.

The event kicked off in May with Terra Merhyem’s Excalibur exhibitions. Her multimedia installation based on the Arthurian legends included music, a group dance performance, text, and 3D art. The next big event will be by Rage Darkstone, with many more events to come over the next months.

Francophone community restarts the Virtual Discovery Tour event

Virtual Discovery Tour group at Serenity Zoo, Vladimir at center. (Image courtesy Serenity grid.).

The Francophone virtual tourist group will on Thursday, September 1 restart the Virtual Discovery Tour event and will be hosting regular meetups and visiting French speaking places in the metaverse. The meetups are held in voice.

The tour event was begun and curated for three years by Virtual Dream’s Vladimir Djannovic but stopped after Virtual Dream grid closed a few months ago.

To help the French OpenSim diaspora to stay in touch, the Francophone community also now have has a Discord Group that anyone with these interests can join.

Memorial Day at Equinox grid

(Image courtesy Club Equinox.).

Club Equinox grid will be hosting the grid’s Memorial Day celebration starting 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. Pacific Time on Sunday, May 22 at the EQG Club Equinox region.

There will be music but the details of the activities are not yet announced. Contact grid owner and administrator Aubrey at Xariaaubrey1972@gmail.com to register for the event.

The hypergrid address is equinoxgrid.com:8002:EQG Club Equinox.

New grids

The following grids were added to our database this month: Darkworldz Grid, France PR, Genesis Roleplay Grid, Imperiya Grid, Love Lemon, Old Fuori Grid, SecretLifeGrid, Thug, and Youth Nation.

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 david@hypergridbusiness.com.

Top 40 grids by land area

The list below is a small subset of existing OpenSim grids. We are now tracking a total of 1,756 different publicly-accessible grids, 366 of which were active this month, and 2867 of which published their statistics.

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.

Below are the 40 largest grids by total land area, in terms of standard region equivalents.

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