While the total number of registered OpenSim users increased by 2,528 this month, both land area and active users were down by 271 regions and 803 actives, respectively. However, Darkheart’s Playground‘s website was down this month and I couldn’t get its numbers — and, last month, that grid reported more than 400 regions and more than 1,500 actives.
So the drop in usage is most likely a technical issue, not a sign of decreasing traffic because of the nice weather outside.
If you’re a nerd who likes to see the exact totals, OpenSim’s public grids reported 148,945 standard region equivalents this month, 497,424 registered users, and 47,101 active users.
The following grids were added to my database this month: Adrian Labs, Big City, Carnivale Grid, Cave Grid, Farm Grid, MS Axiom, Nemeton Grove, SnuSnu Island, Sublimit Metaverse, ThinkSim, Time Grid, Tranquility Grid, WonderVerse, and Xaara CA.
The following 12 grids were marked as suspended this month: Anubis, Czech Welcome Centre, Edge of Reality Grid, KittyBlue, LeBourg, Mysterious Grid 2, Otterland, Raynna, Sweet Life, Willow Lake, WoodstockSim, and XTAL.
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. 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.
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: 12,329 active users
OSgrid: 4,264 active users
GBG World: 2,241 active users
Alternate Metaverse: 2,217 active users
DigiWorldz: 2,015 active users
Groovy Verse: 1,347 active users
Sciattisi Grid: 1,298 active users
Neverworld: 1,043 active users
Trianon World: 947 active users
Littlefield: 874 active users
AvatarLife: 874 active users
Cave Grid: 838 active users
New Life Italy: 828 active users
Craft World: 804 active users
AviWorlds: 787 active users
Sanctum Astra: 787 active users
BloodMoon: 731 active users
Party Destination Grid: 728 active users
Friends Grid: 595 active users
Gentle Fire Grid: 520 active users
SpaceGrid: 494 active users
Eureka World: 454 active users
Jungle Friends Grid: 446 active users
ZetaWorlds: 441 active users
Endless Grid: 419 active users
Kitely doubles region performance
Kitely has upgraded all its region plans, so that regions are now 50 percent faster than before, the company announced today.
“We’ve done this by upgrading to the latest Amazon server technology, the m8i generation, while keeping our existing prices,” said Oren Hurvitz, Kitely’s co-founder and VP R&D, in the announcement. “This upgrade enables your worlds to handle more scripts and avatar activity without experiencing server lag.”
According to Hurvitz, Kitely achieves this performance by using powerful servers and putting no more than four “worlds” on each server — “world” being Kitely’s name for variable-sized regions.
Kitely is also unique among OpenSim grids for its on-demand model. Regions are only activated when someone is using them. When they’re empty, they’re put to sleep, reducing operating costs for the company — and allowing Kitely to rent their regions starting at $15 a month for a single region with up to 15,000 prims, capable of holding up to 10 avatars.
Kitely also has three other rental options, with the top one being a variable-sized region that’s the equivalent of 64 standard regions in size, capable of holding up to 80 simultaneous visitors and 150,000 prims for $120 a month. (That divides out to less than $2 per standard region.)
You can see all the pricing here.
“Our servers also benefit from being hosted in Amazon Web Services, the world’s leading cloud provider,” Hurvitz added. “Our servers are automatically moved between 3 different US-based AWS data centers to minimize the chance of a problem in one data center taking down our entire system.”
As a result of this, Kitely has had no unscheduled downtime in all the time I’ve been covering OpenSim — and I’ve been covering OpenSim since before Kitely even launched.
Kitely typically ranks very highly in technology and support in our reader surveys. However, it has been lagging behind in community. Last year, the grid started to address this by opening new event and expo centers. The first major event was the Synthetic Dreams art exhibition. Two weeks ago, Kitely announced that it would be extending this exhibition by another three months.
“The Wrong Biennale Pavilion, Synthetic Dreams, is a great example of what OpenSim creators can achieve,” said Kitely CEO and co-founder Ilan Tochner. “It would have been a shame to shut it down, so we offered to extend it by another three months. We’re proud to host such a strong exhibit in Kitely and highly recommend that anyone who hasn’t seen it yet take this opportunity to visit.”
Visit the Wrong Biennale Pavilion at the Kitely Expo Center via hypergrid at grid.kitely.com:8002:Kitely Expo Center.
New OpenSim grid launches, powered by AI, with in-world 3D content creation
OpenSim veteran Fabio Bastos is back with a new grid, ThinkSim.
The standout features are ThinkVox, a voice system built directly into the grid, and in-world AI-powered 3D content creation using the Hunyuan 3D model.
ThinkVoxt offers both proximity and grid-wide voice out of the box without the usual headaches, costs, or dependencies on external services like Vivox, and it’s already available as a commercial service for other OpenSim grids.
“For years, voice in OpenSimulator was a persistent headache. The options were fragile, expensive, or abandoned,” wrote Basto. “I am proud to say we solved it.” You can read his full article here.
On the 3D content side, residents can use Hunyuan 3D to generate meshes in-world. And it’s not just raw AI output, either. Every generated asset runs through a headless Blender pipeline that fixes normals, generates four levels of detail, and unwraps UVs before dropping a finished object into the user’s inventory.
The grid also leverages OpenClaw, an AI agent framework where the agents handle everything from identity validation to issuing signed digital certificates.
I’ve been expecting someone to launch something like this in OpenSim for a while. Now, can someone please write a web-based viewer for OpenSim? And refactor the back end to work with virtual reality headsets? We desperately need an open source platform for virtual reality and there still isn’t a good one out there. Creating something that’s backwards-compatible with OpenSim means that we can get something community-owned that’s not from one of the big tech giants.
Online marketplaces for OpenSim content
As of April, there are 21,898 product listings in Kitely Market, containing 42,727 product variations, of which 37,419 are exportable, according to Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner.
A total of 586 new products were added to the market, some in multiple variations, since mid-March. It was the biggest single-month increase in product listings in the past five years.
Kitely Market has delivered orders to 678 OpenSim grids to date.
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.
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 297 active grids this month, 212 of which published statistics. I’m currently tracking a total of 2,115 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: 33,807 regions
OSgrid: 25,528 regions
Kitely: 17,780 regions
ZetaWorlds: 16,969 regions
Groovy Verse: 15,226 regions
Alternate Metaverse: 11,405 regions
Neverworld: 2,789 regions
DigiWorldz: 2,468 regions
GBG World: 1,935 regions
Discovery Grid: 1,614 regions
Tag Grid: 1,561 regions
Friends Grid: 1,417 regions
ArtDestiny: 1,156 regions
Sub-Version Space: 1,065 regions
Virtual Worlds Grid: 910 regions
Exotic Realities: 741 regions
Kinky Haven: 705 regions
AviWorlds: 637 regions
AvatarLife: 637 regions
New Life Italy: 631 regions
Virtual Worlds Zone: 558 regions
Littlefield: 496 regions
Furry World: 358 regions
EdMondo: 310 regions
BloodMoon: 273 regions
Migrating Coconuts: 247 regions
Craft World: 246 regions
Open Virtual Worlds: 241 regions
OliGrid: 214 regions
MisFitz Grid: 209 regions
Japan Open Grid: 201 regions
Sense Limits: 185 regions
Spartans Keep: 171 regions
Kater and Friends: 166 regions
Adreans-World: 165 regions
Maze of The Mind: 164 regions
I Love You Grid: 160 regions
Logicamp: 139 regions
Utopia Skye: 139 regions
Outworldz: 138 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].
