OpenSim user growth cools down with chilly weather – Hypergrid Business
The weather’s been getting cooler here in the US where I live — some days, at least. The weather’s been a little wonky lately. And there have been other things happening in the country that make me want to spend less time in the real world and more time in a virtual one. So it makes sense that registered users and land area both went up in the public OpenSim grids.
What’s more surprising is that the total active numbers went down — by more than 2,700 users.
Sure, Moonrose, which reported over 900 active users last month, seems to be having website issues and did not publish its stats this month. In addition, Vida Dupla, which had 375 actives last month, did not report its active user numbers this month. And Great Canadian Grid, which had over 600 actives last month, is now closed.
But several grids also reported significant drops in active user numbers. OSgrid reported a drop of more than 800 actives compared to last month, Craft World saw a drop of over 200, and five grids lost more than 100 actives each.
So there’s something going on beyond just a grid closure and some reporting issues.
Maybe everyone went out partying for Halloween and spent less time in-world? Or maybe other people like the cooler weather and are enjoying the fall leaves and brisk walks while wearing cozy sweaters?
Nope! According to reader Paul Clevett, from Wolf Territories, OSgrid is down for maintenance. And I found the announcement. Thanks, Paul, for the heads up!
Apparently, OSgrid is currently offline, and has been since November 7, because it’s storage cluster was running out of space.
“OSgrid has 17 years of data which is approx several hundred million assets,” the announcement said. And it gets worse. The grid stores both the asset data and a redundant copy, but they’re not stored at the actual size — every asset looks bigger than it actually is.
To fix the problem, the grid’s storage needs to reconfigured, which involves moving millions of assets and scrubbing out the phantom extra space to free it up again. Doing this while people are using the grid would create a bad user experience, so they put it into maintenance mode during the bulk of the work.
The bad news is that they don’t know how long it’s going to take. The good news is that they don’t expect any assets to get lost.
Anyway, I am now tracking a total of 2,677 public grids, of which 295 were active this month and 232 published their statistics. 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 32,867 standard region equivalents, even though it lost more than 2,000 regions, while Wolf Territories Grid was the most active, with 7,379 unique logins over the past 30 days.
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.
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.
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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:
Wolf Territories Grid: 7,379 active users
OSgrid: 4,046 active users
GBG World: 2,498 active users
DigiWorldz: 2,190 active users
Alternate Metaverse: 2,058 active users
Darkheart’s Playground: 2,011 active users
WaterSplash: 1,497 active users
Trianon World: 1,092 active users
Neverworld: 1,042 active users
AviVerse AlterEgo: 1,020 active users
AviWorlds: 994 active users
Astralia: 867 active users
Littlefield: 861 active users
Party Destination Grid: 822 active users
AvatarLife: 672 active users
Groovy Verse: 605 active users
Eureka World: 595 active users
NakedWorldz: 576 active users
SunEden Resort: 553 active users
Gentle Fire Grid: 514 active users
Herederos Grid: 494 active users
Kitely: 462 active users
ZetaWorlds: 452 active users
Jungle Friends Grid: 434 active users
New Life Italy: 434 active users
Online marketplaces for OpenSim content
There are currently 20,973 product listings in Kitely Market containing 41,105 product variations, 35,866 of which are exportable.
Kitely Market has delivered orders to 632 OpenSim grids to date.
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.
Kitely also announced support for PBR materials and larger textures earlier this month.
New grids
I added one new grid to my database this month: NakedWorldz.
If you know of any public grid that we’re missing, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.
Suspended grids
The following nine grids were suspended this month: Angel Grid, Ares World, Binders World, Cajun Grid, DreamNation, Ghost Area, Homeland, KubwasWelt, and Nosso Lar.
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.
OSgrid: 32,867 regions
Wolf Territories Grid: 29,987 regions
Kitely: 18,126 regions
ZetaWorlds: 13,032 regions
Alternate Metaverse: 10,437 regions
Groovy Verse: 8,756 regions
Virtual Vista Metaverse: 6,217 regions
DigiWorldz: 3,515 regions
CandM World: 2,094 regions
Discovery Grid: 1,714 regions
Tag Grid: 1,465 regions
Shoalwater Bay: 1,104 regions
Friends Grid: 1,040 regions
Simation Grid: 1,024 regions
ArtDestiny: 961 regions
GBG World: 961 regions
Virtual Worlds Grid: 914 regions
AviWorlds: 818 regions
Craft World: 711 regions
Kinky Haven: 669 regions
AvatarLife: 597 regions
Littlefield: 478 regions
Furry World: 373 regions
Neverworld: 372 regions
Virtual Worlds Zone: 364 regions
Darkheart’s Playground: 323 regions
Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
EdMondo: 300 regions
Open Virtual Worlds: 229 regions
MisFitz Grid: 213 regions
Counter Earth: 199 regions
Kater and Friends: 198 regions
Japan Open Grid: 197 regions
Adreans-World: 161 regions
Utopia Skye: 156 regions
XTalent: 142 regions
GerGrid: 141 regions
WestWorld Grid: 126 regions
Outworldz: 126 regions
Logicamp: 120 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.
