I know we haven’t done one of these in a while, but I’ll be doing a presentation on OpenSim — and on AI — at this year’s OpenSim Community Conference, so we’ll need some recent stats!

The big news is that OSgrid reported the equivalent of 864,868 standard region equivalents this month — normally, its land area is around 35,000 regions. If it still had 35,000 regions, the total OpenSim land area this month would have been 142,108 — still an impressive number, but not 971,976!

And even with the smaller number, OSgrid would still be the largest grid by land area.

According to OSgrid president Dan Banner, the regions are from someone working on a continental project.

“They were trying to map out North America,” Banner told Hypergrid Business. “I will check with them and see what’s valid or not and clean up if not.”

For the land area chart below, I’m using the 35,000-region land area number for OSgrid, not the 800,000-region land area.

In other OSgrid news, the grid is celebrating its 18th anniversary this year, and there will be an annual fundraiser with an auction next week.

In other OpenSim stats news, total number of registered users went up by more than 2,000 compared to this past January, when I last ran the stats, while the total number of active users went down by a little over 3,000. The reason is probably because I only have 241 active grids on my list right now, down from 300 in January.

There have probably been a ton of new grids added over the past few months that I’m missing, and a bunch that changed their loginURLs or domain names, or who moved their stats page — grids who should be showing up in the stats but aren’t.

If you’re one of those grids, email me at [email protected].

I am now tracking a total of 2,582 public grids, of which 241 were active this month, and 191 published their statistics.

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.

Hypergrid Business content update

As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve scaled back on Hypergrid Business these last couple of years, mostly due to being super busy with AI coverage at my day job. But then someone offered to buy the site from me. And, in an attempt to get the best possible price for it, I looked up its latest traffic and performance stats. Keeping in mind that these are at a time when I’m barely updating it.

• According to Google Analytics, there were 11,129 pageviews over the last 30 days, with 5,119 unique visitors. 
• Over the past year, there were 157K views by 66,041 unique visitors. 
• From 2009 to 2023, monthly traffic went from 5,000 pageviews to over 100,000, over 200,000, and, one month, hit 346,981. 
• The total number of views over that period was 8.7 million. During the first half of 2023, page views hovered between 29K and 39K a month.

So if we have more content on the site, pageviews would probably go back up. Most of the people would be coming for the VR and AR articles, sure, but, in the process, they might learn something about OpenSim.

But then I found a few more positive indicators. Our Google Search Console shows that Goolge is still showing Hypergrid Business links to millions of people, it’s still listed as a Google News source and it’s included in Google Discover.

Also, a few other nice indicators:

What could someone do with a site like this, with all of its history and domain credibility? Well, they could use it as a launch pad for up-to-date content about VR and AI.

And, since the readers are tech-friendly — in fact, OpenSim readers don’t mind being on the raw, bleeding edges of technology! — they probably wouldn’t mind too much if AI was used to help research and create the content, as long as a real human was overseeing the whole process closely.

In fact, someone recently contacted me with a job doing just that, editing a mostly-AI-generated newsletter about AI.

So that’s an option. I could sell it to someone looking to do something like that.

Or I could keep the site and do something interesting.

For example, I’m very curious about how AI will affect content creators. These are people who create images, text, virtual environments, games — and communities! How will AI affect what they’re doing? What new opportunities will they have — and what will be taken over by automation?

As someone who’s been writing for a living all her adult life, this is a deeply personal question to me.

So I think I’ll be using Hypergrid Business to start exploring it. Maybe I’ll set up some automations to pull  in the stats, say, so that these reports take less time to do. Or maybe I’ll pull in information from OpenSimWorld, grid calendars, and social media feeds and do weekly summaries of the top goings-on on the hypergrid. Or maybe grid owners and organizers can use AI to help them generate regular stories about what’s happening in their communities.

There are a lot of possibilities here. I’m looking forward to doing some exploring.

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. Wolf Territories Grid: 10,860 active users
2. OSgrid: 4,265 active users
3. Alternate Metaverse: 2,399 active users
4. DigiWorldz: 2,095 active users
5. GBG World: 2,051 active users
6. WaterSplash: 1,650 active users
7. Darkheart’s Playground: 1,570 active users
8. Sciattisi Grid: 1,408 active users
9. Groovy Verse: 1,374 active users
10. Trianon World: 936 active users
11. AvatarLife: 928 active users
12. Neverworld: 926 active users
13. Sanctum Astra: 913 active users
14. AviWorlds: 875 active users
15. Party Destination Grid: 802 active users
16. Littlefield: 800 active users
17. Craft World: 582 active users
18. Gentle Fire Grid: 576 active users
19. BloodMoon: 536 active users
20. ZetaWorlds: 525 active users
21. SpaceGrid: 399 active users
22. Kitely: 395 active users
23. Herederos Grid: 383 active users
24. Astralia: 380 active users
25. Jungle Friends Grid: 356 active users

Online marketplaces for OpenSim content

I don’t currently have the latest Kitely Market stats because I forgot to email Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner and ask for them.

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.

New grids

The following grids were added to our database this month: Nitro, Wild Grid, and WoodstockSim.

If you know of any public grid that we’re missing, please email me at [email protected].

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: 864,868 regions
• Wolf Territories Grid: 33,253 regions
• Kitely: 17,840 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 17,018 regions
• Groovy Verse: 14,097 regions
• DigiWorldz: 3,494 regions
• Neverworld: 2,620 regions
• Discovery Grid: 1,614 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,465 regions
• Friends Grid: 1,184 regions
• ArtDestiny: 1,089 regions
• Craft World: 969 regions
• GBG World: 955 regions
• AviWorlds: 737 regions
• Kinky Haven: 685 regions
• AvatarLife: 600 regions
• Virtual Worlds Zone: 558 regions
• Littlefield: 533 regions
• Darkheart’s Playground: 410 regions
• Furry World: 358 regions
• EdMondo: 309 regions
• Virtual Vista Metaverse: 262 regions
• Migrating Coconuts: 247 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 241 regions
• BloodMoon: 226 regions
• MisFitz Grid: 217 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 201 regions
• Counter Earth: 179 regions
• Kater and Friends: 166 regions
• Adreans-World: 164 regions
• SpaceGrid: 160 regions
• Utopia Skye: 150 regions
• XTalent: 149 regions
• GerGrid: 141 regions
• I Love You Grid: 140 regions
• WestWorld Grid: 137 regions
• Outworldz: 134 regions
• Arcadia Asylum: 134 regions
• Logicamp: 133 regions
• Jungle Friends Grid: 124 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 [email protected].

Hypergrid Business editor and publisher Maria Korolov is a science fiction novelist. During the day, Maria Korolov is an award-winning freelance technology journalist who covers artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and enterprise virtual reality. See her Amazon author page here and follow her on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, and check out her latest videos on the Maria Korolov YouTube channel. Email her at [email protected]. Her first virtual world novella, Krim Times, made the Amazon best-seller list in its category. Her second novella, The Lost King of Krim, is out now. She is also the publisher of MetaStellar, a new online magazine of speculative fiction.

Latest posts by Maria Korolov (see all)

The total land area in OpenSim fell this month by over 3,000 standard region equivalents, the total number of registered users fell by just over 1,000, and the number of active monthly users dropped by 425 compared to this time last month.

The region loss was due to the fact that Discovery Grid did not report its region totals this month. In April, the grid reported 5,178 standard region equivalents.

In addition, several grids did not report their stats this month, including Kater and Friends, ProxyNet, Caribou Grid, and Resurgence. Each of these grids has reported hundreds of active users earlier this year. If the grid has moved, please let me know at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

The numerical losses were not due to 3rd Rock Grid’s closure yesterday, since that grid still showed up as active for the past four weeks and did report its stats. Its loss will show up in next month’s stats report.

The total land area on OpenSim’s public grids reached the equivalent of 135,700 standard regions this month, down from last month’s all-time high — and still several times bigger that the total land area of Second Life.

The biggest gainer in terms of land area was OSgrid, which gained 1,160 new standard region equivalents, maintaining its status as the largest public grid in OpenSim. It was followed in growth numbers by ZetaWorlds with 1,024 new regions and Wolf Territories Grid with 384 new regions.

At the same time, the number of active users dropped to 47,195.

Wolf Territories Grid retained their first-place position by traffic numbers.

I’m now tracking a total of 2,661 OpenSim grids, of which 307 were active, and 249 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.

The following grids were added to our database this month: 3World, BachmansWorld One, Bridger, CyberDataStorm, and Dark Heaven.

Also, I’m no longer sending out a monthly email blast reminding OpenSim grid owners to send me news and updates for this report. If you have news, please email me before the tenth of the month if you want a short item included in this monthly wrap-up. For longer news, feel free to send me press releases at any time.

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:

1. Wolf Territories Grid: 5,904 active users
2. OSgrid: 5,263 active users
3. GBG World: 2,174 active users
4. DigiWorldz: 2,125 active users
5. Alternate Metaverse: 2,001 active users
6. Darkheart’s Playground: 1,462 active users
7. WaterSplash: 1,419 active users
8. Vida Dupla: 1,222 active users
9. Moonrose: 1,149 active users
10. AviWorlds: 1,105 active users
11. Neverworld: 1,086 active users
12. Trianon World: 1,014 active users
13. Littlefield: 993 active users
14. Craft World: 965 active users
15. AvatarLife: 940 active users
16. Party Destination Grid: 845 active users
17. Astralia: 773 active users
18. Virtualife: 750 active users
19. Kitely: 655 active users
20. German World Grid: 623 active users
21. ZetaWorlds: 618 active users
22. Herederos Grid: 588 active users
23. CandM World: 563 active users
24. Groovy Verse: 505 active users
25. Eureka World: 490 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.

• OSgrid: 30,960 regions
• Wolf Territories Grid: 28,928 regions
• Kitely: 18,085 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 12,772 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 9,811 regions
• Groovy Verse: 7,864 regions
• DigiWorldz: 3,546 regions
• German World Grid: 2,476 regions
• CandM World: 1,760 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,464 regions
• Shoalwater Bay: 1,072 regions
• GBG World: 956 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 915 regions
• 3rd Rock Grid: 872 regions
• AviWorlds: 853 regions
• Friends Grid: 816 regions
• ArtDestiny: 784 regions
• Kinky Haven: 669 regions
• AvatarLife: 605 regions
• Littlefield: 514 regions
• Craft World: 471 regions
• GorGrid: 430 regions
• Tomi’s World: 400 regions
• Furry World: 373 regions
• Neverworld: 344 regions
• DreamNation: 318 regions
• Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
• EdMondo: 300 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 241 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 194 regions
• Counter Earth: 186 regions
• MisFitz Grid: 181 regions
• Adreans-World: 173 regions
• GerGrid: 141 regions
• OpenSim Fest: 140 regions
• Darkheart’s Playground: 137 regions
• WestWorld Grid: 135 regions
• Outworldz: 127 regions
• Galactic Virtual: 127 regions
• Logicamp: 123 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.

Hypergrid Business editor and publisher Maria Korolov is a science fiction novelist. During the day, Maria Korolov is an award-winning freelance technology journalist who covers artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and enterprise virtual reality. See her Amazon author page here and follow her on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, and check out her latest videos on the Maria Korolov YouTube channel. Email her at maria@hypergridbusiness.com. Her first virtual world novella, Krim Times, made the Amazon best-seller list in its category. Her second novella, The Lost King of Krim, is out now. She is also the publisher of MetaStellar, a new online magazine of speculative fiction.

Latest posts by Maria Korolov (see all)

OpenSim active users are up by 1,039 this month, reaching a new all-time high of 48,234. The total land area also increased, by 489 standard region equivalents.

However, the total number of registered users on all the public OpenSim grids fell by more than 10,000 since May. The biggest reason for the drop? 3rd Rock Grid is now officially closed, with some of its communities moved to ZetaWorlds. Last month, 3rd Rock Grid reported 13,615 registered users, though it had only 250 actives. 3rd Rock was one of the oldest OpenSim grounds, founded back in 2008, and accumulated a lot of user registrations over the past decade and a half.

Several other grids did not report their stats this month, including CandM World, which was active this month but showed no stats on its stats page. The grid had over 500 actives in May.

We are now tracking a total of 2,663 public grids, of which 309 are active and 253 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.

This month, OSgrid was the largest grid by land area, with 32,547 standard region equivalents, while Wolf Territories Grid was the most active, with 6,232 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.

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. Wolf Territories Grid: 6,232 active users
2. OSgrid: 5,186 active users
3. GBG World: 2,239 active users
4. DigiWorldz: 2,156 active users
5. Alternate Metaverse: 2,025 active users
6. Vida Dupla: 1,750 active users
7. Darkheart’s Playground: 1,694 active users
8. WaterSplash: 1,650 active users
9. Neverworld: 1,101 active users
10. AviWorlds: 1,068 active users
11. Trianon World: 1,023 active users
12. Moonrose: 936 active users
13. AvatarLife: 930 active users
14. Littlefield: 899 active users
15. Party Destination Grid: 839 active users
16. Astralia: 836 active users
17. Craft World: 791 active users
18. Virtualife: 666 active users
19. Virtualife: 664 active users
20. Kitely: 627 active users
21. ZetaWorlds: 596 active users
22. Eureka World: 583 active users
23. Groovy Verse: 514 active users
24. Herederos Grid: 511 active users
25. Virtual Vista Metaverse: 507 active users

The biggest change on this list was the addition of Virtual Vista Metaverse, a new grid in our database, which had a strong launch.

Online marketplaces for OpenSim content

There are currently 20,793 product listings in Kitely Market containing 40,862 product variations, 35,648 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 624 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 has recently doubled the performance of its regions while keeping prices the same.

New grids

The following grids were added to our database this month: Lady’s Dreamworld and Virtual Vista Metaverse.

If you know of any public grid that we’re missing, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

Suspended grids

The following 18 grids were marked as suspended this month: Admeja, Bernicia, BigOne, Bubble Grid, EducaSim, Eleutherias, Golden Palace Gaming, KittyBlue, Mystic Bermuda, Pleasant Retreat, Resurgence, Royal Grid, Starfleet, The Crying Grid, Tropicana Grid, Twilight, Uzuri Virtual, and VR Playground.

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: 32,547 regions
• Wolf Territories Grid: 29,248 regions
• Kitely: 18,077 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 12,910 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 10,178 regions
• Groovy Verse: 7,837 regions
• DigiWorldz: 3,544 regions
• Virtual Vista Metaverse: 3,253 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,464 regions
• Shoalwater Bay: 1,072 regions
• GBG World: 956 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 915 regions
• AviWorlds: 842 regions
• Friends Grid: 816 regions
• ArtDestiny: 784 regions
• Kinky Haven: 669 regions
• Craft World: 642 regions
• AvatarLife: 603 regions
• Littlefield: 514 regions
• GorGrid: 430 regions
• Furry World: 373 regions
• Neverworld: 343 regions
• DreamNation: 314 regions
• Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
• EdMondo: 300 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 229 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 186 regions
• Counter Earth: 186 regions
• MisFitz Grid: 182 regions
• Kater and Friends: 180 regions
• Adreans-World: 173 regions
• Darkheart’s Playground: 168 regions
• GerGrid: 141 regions
• OpenSim Fest: 140 regions
• WestWorld Grid: 135 regions
• Logicamp: 129 regions
• Galactic Virtual: 127 regions
• Outworldz: 126 regions
• XTalent: 124 regions
• Utopia Skye: 116 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.

Hypergrid Business editor and publisher Maria Korolov is a science fiction novelist. During the day, Maria Korolov is an award-winning freelance technology journalist who covers artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and enterprise virtual reality. See her Amazon author page here and follow her on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, and check out her latest videos on the Maria Korolov YouTube channel. Email her at maria@hypergridbusiness.com. Her first virtual world novella, Krim Times, made the Amazon best-seller list in its category. Her second novella, The Lost King of Krim, is out now. She is also the publisher of MetaStellar, a new online magazine of speculative fiction.

Latest posts by Maria Korolov (see all)

Kitely, a leading OpenSim grid, has announced a significant upgrade to its virtual world hosting service, implementing an enhanced version of OpenSim 0.9.2.2. This update comes on the heels of a recent system-wide upgrade that doubled world performance.

According to an announcement earlier this week, the new version of OpenSim includes hundreds of proprietary stability and performance improvements developed by the company over the years. One of the most notable enhancements is faster world startup times, which should improve user experience across the grid, and better compatibility with scripts imported from Second Life.

The most significant feature in OpenSim 0.9.2.2 is the transition from XEngine to YEngine for the scripting system. This change brings both benefits and challenges.

“YEngine is designed to more closely follow the LSL script syntax,” said Oren Hurvitz, Kitely’s co-founder and VP R&D, in the announcement. “This makes it easier to port scripts that were designed for Second Life into OpenSim.” However, he warned that this change may cause some scripts that worked on XEngine to break, requiring users to fix, replace, or remove affected scripts from their Kitely worlds.

The switch to YEngine has also reset all scripts to their initial state.

“That’s because the state files where OpenSim stores script state have changed their format, and YEngine can’t use state files that were created by XEngine,” Hurvitz said.  As a result, users who have scripts needing configuration after being rezzed will need to reconfigure them.

It’s important to note that the transition to the new script engine requires the system to recompile all scripts in each world. According to Hurvitz, “This happens the first time each world is entered following today’s update. This means that each world will take longer than usual to start the first time anyone enters it after this update.”

However, Hurvitz said that this is a one-time delay, and subsequent entries to the world will be faster due to the scripts already being compiled.

This latest upgrade follows Kitely’s recent system-wide enhancement that doubled world performance, demonstrating the company’s ongoing commitment to improving its service without increasing costs to users.

Kitely, which opened to the public in March 2011, is one of the longest-running and most innovative OpenSim grids. With its unique on-demand region system and the popular Kitely Market, the grid is a significant player in the virtual world ecosystem.

For more information about the script changes and how they might affect users’ worlds, Kitely recommends checking the OpenSimulator wiki entry on YEngine.

Hypergrid Business editor and publisher Maria Korolov is a science fiction novelist. During the day, Maria Korolov is an award-winning freelance technology journalist who covers artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and enterprise virtual reality. See her Amazon author page here and follow her on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, and check out her latest videos on the Maria Korolov YouTube channel. Email her at maria@hypergridbusiness.com. Her first virtual world novella, Krim Times, made the Amazon best-seller list in its category. Her second novella, The Lost King of Krim, is out now. She is also the publisher of MetaStellar, a new online magazine of speculative fiction.

Latest posts by Maria Korolov (see all)

I’ve been interacting with OpenSim bots — or NPCs — for nearly as long as I’ve been covering OpenSim. Which is about 15 years. (Oh my God, has it really been that long?)

I’ve been hoping that OpenSim writing would become by day job, but, unfortunately, OpenSim never really took off. Instead, I covered cybersecurity and, more recently, generative AI.

But then I saw some reporting about a new studies about AI, and immediately thought — this could really be something in OpenSim.

The study was published this past April in the journal Neuroscience of Consciousness, and it showed that a majority of people – 67% to be exact – attribute some degree of consciousness to ChatGPT. And the more people use these AI systems, the more likely they are to see them as conscious entities.

Then, in May, another study showed that 54% of people, after a conversation with ChatGPT, thought it was a real person.

Now, I’m not saying that OpenSim grid owners should run out and install a bunch of bots on their grids that pretend to be real people, in order to lure in more users. That would be dumb, expensive, a waste of resources, possibly illegal and definitely unethical.

But if users knew that these bots were powered by AI and understood that they’re not real people, they might still enjoy interacting with them and develop attachments to them — just like we get attached to brands, or cartoon animals, or characters in a novel. Or, yes, virtual girlfriends or boyfriends.

In the video below, you can see OpenAI’s recent GPT-4o presentation. Yup, the one where ChatGPT sounds suspiciously like Scarlett Johansson in “Her.” I’ve set it to start at the point in the video where they’re talking to her.

I can see why ScarJo got upset — and why that particular voice is no longer available as an option.

Now, as I write this, the voice chatbot they’re demonstrating isn’t widely available yet. But the text version is — and its the text interface that’s most common in OpenSim anyway.

GPT-4o does cost money. It costs money to send it a question and to get a response. A million tokens worth of questions — or 750,000 words — costs $5, and a million token’s worth of response costs $15.

A page of text is roughly 250 words, so a million tokens is about 3,000 pages. So, for $20, you can get a lot of back-and-forth. But there are also cheaper platforms.

Anthropic’s Claude, for example, which has tested better than ChatGPT in some benchmarks, costs a bit less — $3 for a million input tokens, and $15 for a million output tokens.

But there are also free, open-source platforms that you run on your own servers with comparable performance levels. For example, on the LMSYS Chatbot Arena Leaderboard, OpenAI’s GPT-4o in in first place with a score of 1287, Claude 3.5 Sonnet is close behind with 1272, and the (mostly) open source Llama 3 from Meta is not too far distant, with a score of 1207 — and there are several other open source AI platforms at the top of the charts, including Google’s Gemma, NVIDIA’s Nemotron, Cohere’s Command R+, Alibaba’s Qwen2, and Mistral.

I can easily see an OpenSim hosting provider adding an AI service to their package deals.

Imagine the potential for creating truly immersive experiences in OpenSim and other virtual environments. If users are predisposed to see AI entities as conscious, we could create non-player characters that feel incredibly real and responsive.

This could revolutionize storytelling, education, and social interactions in virtual spaces.

We could have bots that users can form meaningful relationships with, AI-driven characters that can adapt to individual user preferences, and virtual environments that feel alive and dynamic.

And then there’s the potential for interactive storytelling and games, with quests and narratives that are more engaging than ever before, create virtual assistants that feel like true companions, or even build communities that blur the lines between AI and human participants.

For those using OpenSim for work, there are also applications here for business and education, in the form of AI tutors, AI executive assistants, AI sales agents, and more.

However, as much as I’m thrilled by these possibilities, I can’t help but feel a twinge of concern.

As the study authors point out, there are some risks to AIs that feel real.

First, there’s the risk of emotional attachment. If users start to view AI entities as conscious beings, they might form deep, potentially unhealthy bonds with these virtual characters. This could lead to a range of issues, from social isolation in the real world to emotional distress if these AI entities are altered or removed.

We’re already seeing that, with people feeling real distress when their virtual girlfriends are turned off.

Then there’s the question of blurred reality. As the line between AI and human interactions becomes less clear, users might struggle to distinguish between the two.

Personally, I’m not too concerned about this one. We’ve had people complaining that other people couldn’t tell fantasy from reality since the days of Don Quixote. Probably even earlier. There were probably cave people sitting around, saying, “Look at the young people with all their cave paintings. They could be out actually hunting, and instead they sit around the cave looking at the paintings.”

Or even earlier, when language was invented. “Look at those young people, sitting around talking about hunting, instead of going out there into the jungle and catching something.”

When movies were first invented, when people started getting “addicted” to television, or video games… we’ve always had moral panics about new media.

The thing is, those moral panics were also, to some extent, justified. Maybe the pulp novels that the printing press gave us didn’t rot our brains. But Mao’s Little Red Book, the Communist Manifesto, that thing that Hitler wrote that I don’t even was aided and abetted by the books they wrote.

So that’s what I’m most worried about — the potential for exploitation. Bad actors could misuse our tendency to anthropomorphize AI, creating deceptive or manipulative experiences that take advantage of users’ emotional connections and lead them to be more tolerant of evil.

But I don’t think that’s something that we, in OpenSim, have to worry about. Our platform doesn’t have the kind of reach it would take to create a new dictator!

I think the worst that would happen is that people might get so engaged that they spend a few dollars more than they planned to spend.

Hypergrid Business editor and publisher Maria Korolov is a science fiction novelist. During the day, Maria Korolov is an award-winning freelance technology journalist who covers artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and enterprise virtual reality. See her Amazon author page here and follow her on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, and check out her latest videos on the Maria Korolov YouTube channel. Email her at maria@hypergridbusiness.com. Her first virtual world novella, Krim Times, made the Amazon best-seller list in its category. Her second novella, The Lost King of Krim, is out now. She is also the publisher of MetaStellar, a new online magazine of speculative fiction.

Latest posts by Maria Korolov (see all)

The total land area of OpenSim’s public grids jumped by more than 33,000 region equivalents this month, with the addition of a large new grid to our list. However, the total number of active users was down by nearly 1,500, due to several grids not reporting stats this month. Missing grids included Fire and Ice, The City, and Little Big City.

The big new grid was Simation Grid, with a reported 25,408 region equivalents. OpenSim’s architecture makes it easy for grid owners to launch with plenty of space. Or it could be a stats mistake — the grid’s website says “Standard Region Equivalents: 25408 Km2” — and if it is actually giving the area in square kilometers, than it has 387,693 total regions, which would make it larger than all the other OpenSim grids put together. I couldn’t find any contact information on the grid’s website, and some of the pages seem to be placeholders, so if you’re the owner of Simation Grid and are reading this, and if I got your numbers wrong — please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com and I’ll update this article!

We are now tracking a total of 2,675 public grids, of which 318 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.

This month, OSgrid was the largest grid by land area, with 33,554 standard region equivalents, while Wolf Territories Grid was the most active, with 6,540 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.

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. Wolf Territories Grid: 6,540 active users
2. OSgrid: 5,168 active users
3. GBG World: 2,333 active users
4. DigiWorldz: 2,163 active users
5. Alternate Metaverse: 1,967 active users
6. Vida Dupla: 1,838 active users
7. Darkheart’s Playground: 1,718 active users
8. WaterSplash: 1,521 active users
9. Trianon World: 1,108 active users
10. AviWorlds: 1,028 active users
11. AviVerse AlterEgo: 987 active users
12. Neverworld: 962 active users
13. Littlefield: 935 active users
14. Party Destination Grid: 840 active users
15. AvatarLife: 837 active users
16. Moonrose: 825 active users
17. Astralia: 771 active users
18. Craft World: 744 active users
19. Herederos Grid: 582 active users
20. Virtual Vista Metaverse: 545 active users
21. Gentle Fire Grid: 537 active users
22. ZetaWorlds: 524 active users
23. Groovy Verse: 522 active users
24. Kitely: 462 active users
25. Barefoot Dreamers: 438 active users

The biggest change on this list was the addition of Virtual Vista Metaverse, a new grid in our database, which had a strong launch.

Online marketplaces for OpenSim content

There are currently 20,965 product listings in Kitely Market containing 41,073 product variations, 35,835 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 628 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 has recently upgraded its version of OpenSim to allow for faster start-up times and better compatibility with scripts imported from Second Life.

New grids

The following grids were added to our database this month: Agartha, AmaziWorld, Casperia Prime, Gridworld, HG Safari Grid, Nosso Lar, Sciattisi Grid, Simation Grid, Steg, and Tenth Dimension.

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 marked suspended this month: Eenhgrid, Hermopolis Chimera, Kantarobasta Grid, Kindred Spirits World, Pseudospace, Rocket World, Royal Grid, Starfleet, and  Tropicana Grid.

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: 33,554 regions
• Wolf Territories Grid: 29,276 regions
• Simation Grid: 25,408 regions
• Kitely: 18,108 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 12,932 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 10,437 regions
• Groovy Verse: 8,201 regions
• Discovery Grid: 4,945 regions
• DigiWorldz: 3,527 regions
• Virtual Vista Metaverse: 3,260 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,464 regions
• Shoalwater Bay: 1,072 regions
• Friends Grid: 1,040 regions
• GBG World: 957 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 915 regions
• ArtDestiny: 900 regions
• AviWorlds: 841 regions
• Craft World: 673 regions
• Kinky Haven: 669 regions
• AvatarLife: 594 regions
• Littlefield: 513 regions
• GorGrid: 430 regions
• Furry World: 373 regions
• Virtual Worlds Zone: 364 regions
• Neverworld: 348 regions
• DreamNation: 308 regions
• Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
• EdMondo: 300 regions
• Insight Concepts: 240 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 229 regions
• Darkheart’s Playground: 218 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 188 regions
• Counter Earth: 186 regions
• Kater and Friends: 185 regions
• MisFitz Grid: 183 regions
• Adreans-World: 173 regions
• OpenSim Fest: 140 regions
• WestWorld Grid: 135 regions
• XTalent: 133 regions
• GerGrid: 132 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.

Hypergrid Business editor and publisher Maria Korolov is a science fiction novelist. During the day, Maria Korolov is an award-winning freelance technology journalist who covers artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and enterprise virtual reality. See her Amazon author page here and follow her on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, and check out her latest videos on the Maria Korolov YouTube channel. Email her at maria@hypergridbusiness.com. Her first virtual world novella, Krim Times, made the Amazon best-seller list in its category. Her second novella, The Lost King of Krim, is out now. She is also the publisher of MetaStellar, a new online magazine of speculative fiction.

Latest posts by Maria Korolov (see all)

Summer is generally a slow time for OpenSim, and virtual worlds in general, as people spend more time outside and on vacation and educational projects go on break.

The total number of active users went down by more than 3,700, to 43,001.

DigiWorldz, for example, lost 1,220 actives this month, according to its stats reports, as well as 21 regions.

In addition, several grids did not report any stats this month, including German Grid, which had 235 actives last month, German World Grid, which previously reported 623, and The City, which reported 265 actives in July.

But the total land area of OpenSim’s public grids rose by nearly 1,494 region equivalents this month, and OpenSim grids registered a total of 1,545 new users.

We are now tracking a total of 2,675 public grids, of which 311 are active and 244 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.

This month, OSgrid was the largest grid by land area, with 33,203 standard region equivalents, while Wolf Territories Grid was the most active, with 6,733 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.

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. Wolf Territories Grid: 6,733 active users
2. OSgrid: 4,844 active users
3. GBG World: 2,295 active users
4. Vida Dupla: 1,987 active users
5. Alternate Metaverse: 1,885 active users
6. Darkheart’s Playground: 1,723 active users
7. WaterSplash: 1,447 active users
8. AviWorlds: 1,068 active users
9. AviVerse AlterEgo: 1,002 active users
10. DigiWorldz: 943 active users
11. Trianon World: 937 active users
12. Neverworld: 897 active users
13. Littlefield: 822 active users
14. Party Destination Grid: 796 active users
15. Moonrose: 774 active users
16. Astralia: 763 active users
17. Craft World: 723 active users
18. AvatarLife: 717 active users
19. Herederos Grid: 578 active users
20. Groovy Verse: 547 active users
21. Virtual Vista Metaverse: 494 active users
22. ZetaWorlds: 476 active users
23. Kitely: 460 active users
24. Gentle Fire Grid: 448 active users
25. DreamNation: 342 active users

The biggest change on this list was the addition of Virtual Vista Metaverse, a new grid in our database, which had a strong launch.

Online marketplaces for OpenSim content

There are currently 20,965 product listings in Kitely Market containing 41,073 product variations, 35,835 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 628 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 has recently upgraded its version of OpenSim to allow for faster start-up times and better compatibility with scripts imported from Second Life.

Kitely is also continuing its $90 sale on Mega Worlds.

New grids

I didn’t add any new grids to the database this month.

If you know of any public grid that we’re missing, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

Suspended grids

The following 11 grids were marked suspended this month: Butschiland, Butschiland, Destiny Grid, Fire and Ice Grid, Galactic Virtual, IMA Metaverse Depot, KoolPheller Estates, The Public World, Tropical Isle, UCI Mondego vLab, and Virtual RBM.

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: 33,203 regions
• Wolf Territories Grid: 29,276 regions
• Simation Grid: 25,408 regions
• Kitely: 18,246 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 12,980 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 10,605 regions
• Groovy Verse: 8,334 regions
• Discovery Grid: 4,945 regions
• DigiWorldz: 3,506 regions
• Virtual Vista Metaverse: 3,269 regions
• CandM World: 1,849 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,464 regions
• Shoalwater Bay: 1,072 regions
• Friends Grid: 1,040 regions
• ArtDestiny: 961 regions
• GBG World: 957 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 914 regions
• AviWorlds: 809 regions
• Kinky Haven: 669 regions
• Craft World: 630 regions
• AvatarLife: 586 regions
• Littlefield: 513 regions
• GorGrid: 430 regions
• Furry World: 373 regions
• Virtual Worlds Zone: 364 regions
• Neverworld: 318 regions
• Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
• EdMondo: 300 regions
• DreamNation: 284 regions
• WestWorld Grid: 274 regions
• Darkheart’s Playground: 244 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 229 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 197 regions
• Kater and Friends: 191 regions
• Counter Earth: 183 regions
• MisFitz Grid: 175 regions
• Adreans-World: 172 regions
• GerGrid: 141 regions
• XTalent: 138 regions
• Outworldz: 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.

Hypergrid Business editor and publisher Maria Korolov is a science fiction novelist. During the day, Maria Korolov is an award-winning freelance technology journalist who covers artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and enterprise virtual reality. See her Amazon author page here and follow her on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, and check out her latest videos on the Maria Korolov YouTube channel. Email her at maria@hypergridbusiness.com. Her first virtual world novella, Krim Times, made the Amazon best-seller list in its category. Her second novella, The Lost King of Krim, is out now. She is also the publisher of MetaStellar, a new online magazine of speculative fiction.

Latest posts by Maria Korolov (see all)

This time of year — in the northern hemisphere, at least — people start spending more time inside as temperatures drop and school starts.

So it’s no surprise that the total number of active users on the public OpenSim grids is going up.

According to their published stats report, there were 44,129 actives this up, up by 1,128 from this time a month ago.

However, the total land area went down, by the equivalent of 738 standard regions. All of that drop — and then some — is accounted for by the fact that a single grid, CandM World, didn’t report its stats this month. Last month, it had over 1,800 regions. Today, the website just shows a security error message, so it could just be a configuration error.

We are now tracking a total of 2,675 public grids, of which 311 are active and 244 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.

This month, OSgrid was the largest grid by land area, with 34,103 standard region equivalents, while Wolf Territories Grid was the most active, with 6,950 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.

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. Wolf Territories Grid: 6,950 active users
2. OSgrid: 4,894 active users
3. GBG World: 2,422 active users
4. DigiWorldz: 2,143 active users
5. Darkheart’s Playground: 2,018 active users
6. Alternate Metaverse: 1,789 active users
7. WaterSplash: 1,491 active users
8. AviWorlds: 1,101 active users
9. AviVerse AlterEgo: 1,024 active users
10. Trianon World: 1,004 active users
11. Neverworld: 953 active users
12. Moonrose: 861 active users
13. Littlefield: 858 active users
14. Party Destination Grid: 792 active users
15. Craft World: 790 active users
16. Astralia: 717 active users
17. AvatarLife: 638 active users
18. Herederos Grid: 566 active users
19. Groovy Verse: 564 active users
20. SunEden Resort: 552 active users
21. Great Canadian Grid: 550 active users
22. Gentle Fire Grid: 496 active users
23. Kitely: 495 active users
24. Virtual Vista Metaverse: 456 active users
25. ZetaWorlds: 437 active users

Online marketplaces for OpenSim content

There are currently 21,019 product listings in Kitely Market containing 41,133 product variations, 35,892 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 630 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.

New grids

I didn’t add any new grids to the database this month.

If you know of any public grid that we’re missing, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

Suspended grids

The following 12 grids were suspended this month: BachmansWorld One, CatGrid, DigiGrids, German Grid, Legacy, Mathesis, Matrix, NewOffworld, Oczko, SFgrid, Steg, and Trinity’s DreamGrid/

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: 34,103 regions
• Wolf Territories Grid: 29,277 regions
• Simation Grid: 25,408 regions
• Kitely: 18,320 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 13,010 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 10,605 regions
• Groovy Verse: 8,380 regions
• Discovery Grid: 4,919 regions
• DigiWorldz: 3,526 regions
• Virtual Vista Metaverse: 3,284 regions
• Tag Grid: 1,464 regions
• Shoalwater Bay: 1,088 regions
• Friends Grid: 1,040 regions
• ArtDestiny: 961 regions
• GBG World: 960 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 914 regions
• AviWorlds: 839 regions
• Craft World: 688 regions
• Kinky Haven: 677 regions
• AvatarLife: 587 regions
• Littlefield: 513 regions
• GorGrid: 428 regions
• Furry World: 373 regions
• Virtual Worlds Zone: 364 regions
• Neverworld: 332 regions
• Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
• EdMondo: 300 regions
• Darkheart’s Playground: 276 regions
• WestWorld Grid: 270 regions
• DreamNation: 264 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 229 regions
• MisFitz Grid: 206 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 196 regions
• Kater and Friends: 193 regions
• Counter Earth: 190 regions
• Adreans-World: 170 regions
• GerGrid: 141 regions
• XTalent: 140 regions
• Outworldz: 132 regions
• Arcadia Asylum: 123 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.

Hypergrid Business editor and publisher Maria Korolov is a science fiction novelist. During the day, Maria Korolov is an award-winning freelance technology journalist who covers artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and enterprise virtual reality. See her Amazon author page here and follow her on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, and check out her latest videos on the Maria Korolov YouTube channel. Email her at maria@hypergridbusiness.com. Her first virtual world novella, Krim Times, made the Amazon best-seller list in its category. Her second novella, The Lost King of Krim, is out now. She is also the publisher of MetaStellar, a new online magazine of speculative fiction.

Latest posts by Maria Korolov (see all)

It’s the spooky season here in the United States, with Halloween coming up soon and all sorts of creepy scary stuff happening, and cooler weather outside. Also — we’ve got the elections. So, three reasons for people not to want to leave their house and spend time in OpenSim as well.

Or maybe there’s another reason why active user numbers went up. Who knows? Whatever the cause, the public OpenSim grids gained more than 3,000 new active users compared to this time last month. However, with grid outages and stats changes, total registered users dropped slightly — and land area went down by the equivalent of 24,000 standard regions.

But the drop in land area is easily explained. Simation Grid, which reported 25,408 regions last month is now down to 1,024. Simation is a tiny grid — well, not in size, but in users — with just 3 actives this month. So the land area was most likely a test of server capacity. That happens. People try to see how many regions they can cram into a server, play around with it for a while, then eventually shut it down. After wall, why keep servers running for regions nobody is using?

We are now tracking a total of 2,675 public grids, of which 301 were active this month and 233 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 34,103 standard region equivalents, while Wolf Territories Grid was the most active, with 6,950 unique logins over the past 30 days.

As you can see from the chart above, the Simation regions created a spike in land area this summer, but the land growth is now back to normal levels.

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.

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. Wolf Territories Grid: 7,122 active users
2. OSgrid: 4,910 active users
3. GBG World: 2,435 active users
4. Darkheart’s Playground: 2,206 active users
5. DigiWorldz: 2,186 active users
6. Alternate Metaverse: 1,980 active users
7. WaterSplash: 1,593 active users
8. AviWorlds: 1,081 active users
9. AviVerse AlterEgo: 1,020 active users
10. Neverworld: 965 active users
11. Trianon World: 963 active users
12. Astralia: 943 active users
13. Moonrose: 916 active users
14. Littlefield: 862 active users
15. Party Destination Grid: 807 active users
16. AvatarLife: 735 active users
17. SunEden Resort: 692 active users
18. Great Canadian Grid: 675 active users
19. Craft World: 673 active users
20. Groovy Verse: 597 active users
21. Herederos Grid: 566 active users
22. Kitely: 523 active users
23. Gentle Fire Grid: 499 active users
24. OpenSim Fest: 432 active users
25. Eureka World: 427 active users

Online marketplaces for OpenSim content

There are currently 21,048 product listings in Kitely Market containing 41,164 product variations, 35,920 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.

New grids

I didn’t add any new grids to the database this month.

If you know of any public grid that we’re missing, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

Suspended grids

The following 13 grids were marked as suspended this month: Angel Souls, Free Life, Insight Concepts, New Life Italy, Nordlicht Grid, OB, Phantom Rose, Pineapple, Planet, ProxyNet, TinkerLand, Trans Sidera, and TUIS Open Grid.

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: 34,973 regions
• Wolf Territories Grid: 29,566 regions
• Kitely: 18,165 regions
• ZetaWorlds: 13,023 regions
• Alternate Metaverse: 10,513 regions
• Groovy Verse: 8,459 regions
• DigiWorldz: 3,501 regions
• Virtual Vista Metaverse: 3,259 regions
• CandM World: 2,094 regions
• Discovery Grid: 2,056 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: 960 regions
• Virtual Worlds Grid: 914 regions
• AviWorlds: 838 regions
• Craft World: 696 regions
• Kinky Haven: 677 regions
• AvatarLife: 597 regions
• Littlefield: 514 regions
• GorGrid: 429 regions
• Furry World: 373 regions
• Virtual Worlds Zone: 364 regions
• Neverworld: 336 regions
• Darkheart’s Playground: 312 regions
• Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
• EdMondo: 300 regions
• WestWorld Grid: 270 regions
• Open Virtual Worlds: 229 regions
• MisFitz Grid: 213 regions
• Japan Open Grid: 196 regions
• Counter Earth: 196 regions
• Kater and Friends: 185 regions
• Adreans-World: 161 regions
• Utopia Skye: 145 regions
• GerGrid: 141 regions
• XTalent: 140 regions
• Outworldz: 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.

Hypergrid Business editor and publisher Maria Korolov is a science fiction novelist. During the day, Maria Korolov is an award-winning freelance technology journalist who covers artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and enterprise virtual reality. See her Amazon author page here and follow her on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, and check out her latest videos on the Maria Korolov YouTube channel. Email her at maria@hypergridbusiness.com. Her first virtual world novella, Krim Times, made the Amazon best-seller list in its category. Her second novella, The Lost King of Krim, is out now. She is also the publisher of MetaStellar, a new online magazine of speculative fiction.

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The OpenSim Worlds Fair is set to launch on March 1, 2025, and will celebrate innovation, creativity, art, technology, fashion, and education in OpenSim.

This event, a year in the making, will unite the OpenSim community under one roof, showcasing the talents and achievements that define our world.

With nearly two decades of immersive experience in virtual worlds, the organizers, Cooper Swizzle, Koshari Mahana, Kimm Starr, and entertainment coordinator Rosa Alekseev, are passionate about elevating events throughout the hypergrid. Their dedication to fostering creativity and innovation ensures that this fair will be a memorable experience for all attendees, showcasing the best of what the hypergrid has to offer.

The fair will be held on the Wolf Territories grid, owned by Lone Wolf, and is designed to bring together individuals from diverse backgrounds and interests within the virtual community.

The OpenSim Worlds Fair will feature at least 17 themed stages, showcasing a variety of genres including rock and roll, Motown, Latin, and retro. This diverse selection of stages is designed to keep attendees entertained while they party and connect with others, with each theme curated to align with the performers and DJs. A special acknowledgment goes to Rosa Alekseev for her tireless dedication and exceptional efforts in organizing the entertainment for the fair.

Offering 72 parcels for exhibitors, we still have a few spaces available for those eager to showcase their work, talents, and creativity at this event. While full region-sized parcels are now gone, we have smaller parcels ready for participants looking to make their mark.

A handful of free exhibition spaces remain, providing a platform to share your vision and innovation. This is your chance to be part of a celebration that champions progress and fosters cultural exchange across the hypergrid.

“On October 23, 2024, Thirza Ember’s Hypergrid Safari tour made a stop at the Worlds Fair, drawing  attendees eager to experience the energy and creativity taking shape. Participants were treated to an exclusive sneak peek of the fairgrounds, exploring exhibits and immersive installations.

Attendees shared their thoughts.

“Looks amazing and the grid seems rock solid,” said James Atlloud.

“It has Second Life quality,” said Forest Azure.

“You’ve all done a fantastic job. I’m looking forward to March,” said Lavia LLavine.

In a Hypergrid Safari Facebook Post, Star Ravenhurst wrote: “While some builds are still in progress, many are already completed, and the preview we received left us truly excited for what’s to come. This event promises to be a must-see, filled with fun, innovation, and excitement—mark your calendars because you won’t want to miss it.”

For more information, contact one of our hosts, dive into the fun on our Discord community, visit our website, or email the organizers at OpenSimWorldsFair@gmail.com. Be a part of the OpenSim Worlds Fair and help us bring the hypergrid closer together while celebrating the boundless creativity and ingenuity that define this extraordinary virtual landscape.

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