Category: Metaverse

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OSgrid enters immediate long-term maintenance

OSgrid’s LBSA Plaza is the cross-roads of the hypergrid and a popular virtual hangout for developers, region owners, and metaverse travelers.

OSgrid has entered emergency long-term maintenance after discovering that “all IAR files have been corrupted,” the grid announced yesterday.

This is really bad news for residents who hadn’t yet had time to get their inventory backups downloaded ahead of the grid’s previously announced March 21 database reset. OSgrid will now go into immediate and indefinite closure.

“Unfortunately, the current situation has become unsustainable,” the OSgrid team stated in their announcement. “After careful analysis, it has become clear that it is no longer viable to keep OSgrid online under these conditions.”

The corruption of IAR — inventory archive — files is significant as many residents were using these files to back up their inventories ahead of the planned asset wipe. Users who hadn’t already secured their content through alternative methods may now face permanent losses.

Complete rebuild planned

In light of the new problems, the grid’s administrators have decided to completely rebuild the asset system from scratch.

Assets can include objects, clothing, textures, and other items that grid residents store in their avatar inventories. Some assets might have been purchased from OpenSim content creators and can represent a financial investment. Other assets might have been created from scratch by users, representing time, effort, and creativity. As a result, some residents might be hit hard by the loss.

“We have decided to completely rebuild the assets in a new format, in order to resolve ongoing issues and provide a much more robust and sustainable infrastructure,” the announcement stated.

Unlike the previous timeline that promised a March 28 return, the team now describes the reconstruction as “lengthy and meticulous” with no specific reopening date provided.

“We intend to take the necessary time to ensure the result is stable, functional, and, most importantly, secure,” the OSgrid team stated.

Impact on OpenSim users

This sudden closure accelerates the timeline for OSgrid users who had been planning to back up their content. Users who had been creating OARs — OpenSim archive files — of their regions or transferring items to avatars on other grids will no longer be able to access their content.

The situation particularly affects users who:

  • Had scheduled backups in the coming days or weeks
  • Were relying on the grid’s IAR export tool
  • Had placed items in the dedicated storage regions set up for the transition

For the broader OpenSim ecosystem, this emergency closure may increase migration pressure on other grids that had been preparing for a gradual influx of displaced users.

Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner also warns that other grids may suffer from similar data issues as they become popular and may need to revisit their backup policies.

“You have to maintain daily backups of the entire system to enable you to restore it to the last stable state,” he told Hypergrid Business. “If you don’t do this and only rely on data duplication then when a corruption occurs you won’t have uncorrupted copies of the files to restore to.”

Kitely runs daily backups, he said, and offers a self-service tool that allows Kitely customers to restore their regions from those backups.

“If you’re an OSGrid user who has just lost their home, I recommend you consider the data backup policies of the grid you decide to move to,” Tochner said. “The more people use a grid the more likely it will need to make use of those backup systems.”

Kitely, the third-largest grid by land area, also serves as OpenSim’s main content marketplace.

There are currently 20,954 product listings in Kitely Market containing 41,054 product variations, 35,814 of which are exportable to other grids. Kitely Market users can have their purchases automatically delivered to avatars on other grids. Kitely Market has delivered orders to 642 OpenSim grids to date, Tochner said.

Kitely Market also provides merchants with a tool that can help their customers regain items that were bought for avatars that belong to grids that have shut down or suffered inventory loss, he said.

Volunteer support

OSgrid is operated entirely by volunteers and the management asked for community understanding during this difficult period. “It is important to remember that OSgrid is run by volunteers, all of whom are deeply passionate and committed to the platform. However, it’s also important to keep in mind that our team consists of real people, parents, and professionals with lives outside of their roles within OSgrid.”

The team promised to provide regular updates on their progress but gave no indication of how frequently these updates would come or through which channels.

OSgrid’s history of challenges

This isn’t the first major disruption for OSgrid. In 2014 and 2015, the grid experienced an extended outage lasting several months, during which significant amounts of user data were lost.

The current situation appears potentially more serious, as the grid is undergoing a complete rebuild of its asset system rather than attempting to repair existing infrastructure.

OSgrid, founded in 2007, has served as both a social hub and a technical testing ground for OpenSim development. As one of the largest hypergrid-enabled virtual worlds, its extended absence will be felt throughout the OpenSim ecosystem.

For users affected by this closure, other OpenSim grids including Wolf Territories, Kitely, and Alternate Metaverse have previously offered assistance in accommodating displaced residents.

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Meta’s moderation change means more bad stuff will get through

(Image by Lawrence Pierce via Adobe Firefly.)

As a moderator myself, nothing could sound more disturbing than the idea of a revised social media moderation policy presented with the caveat that more bad stuff will get through.

Recently, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta, the company that heralded and then fumbled the metaverse, will be dialing back their moderation on their various platforms. He has explicitly claimed that, “…we’re going to catch less bad stuff…”

You can watch his presentation here.

This is especially menacing because Zuckerberg identifies bad stuff as including drugs, terrorism, and child exploitation. He also specifically says Meta is going to get rid of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender. They’re going to dial back filters to reduce censorship. Oh, and he says they’re ending fact-checking.

This is a mess.

Moderation is challenging. That challenge varies in relationship to the zeitgeist, the societal character of the times, which is quite complex these days. It also varies by platform. The scope of the challenge of moderation on Facebook is greater than at Hypergrid Business, yet the core issues are the same. Good moderation preserves online well-being for contributors and readers, while respecting genuine alternative perspectives.

At Hypergrid Business we have discussion guidelines that direct our moderation. Primarily, we apply moderation principles on content that is likely to cause personal harm, such as malicious derision and hate-speech towards specific groups or individuals.

At Hypergrid Business, malicious derision, a kind of bad stuff, was driving away contributors. However, letting in more malicious derision would not have improved the discussions. We know this because once discussion guidelines were instituted that removed malicious derision, more contributors posted more comments. So when Zuckerberg says Meta intends to get rid of moderation restrictions on topics like gender and immigration, we know from experience that the bad stuff will be malicious derision and hate-speech towards vulnerable and controversial groups, and this will not improve discussions.

The unfortunate ploy in Meta’s new moderation policies is the use of the expression, “innocent contributors” in the introductory video presentation. He says that the moderation policies on Meta platforms have blocked “innocent contributors”. Although the word ‘innocent’ typically conveys a neutral purity of positive disposition, intent and action, Zuckerberg, uses ‘innocent’ in reference to contributors whether they are the victims or the perpetrators of malicious commentary. This confounding use of the word “innocent” is a strategic verbal misdirection. Zuckerberg attempts to appear concerned while pandering to any and all sensibilities.

Zuckerberg’s emphasis, however, is not limited to moderation filters. Rather, he is laser focused on how Meta is going to end third party fact-checking entirely. Zuckerberg pins the rationale for his position on the assertion that fact-checking is too biased and makes too many mistakes. He offers no examples of what that alleged shortcoming looks like. Nonetheless, he puts a numerical estimation on his concerns and says that if Meta incorrectly censors just 1 percent of posts, that’s millions of people.

Zuckerberg further asserts that fact-checkers have destroyed more trust than they’ve created. Really? Again there are no real world examples presented. But just as a thought experiment, wouldn’t a 99 percent success rate actually be reassuring to readers and contributors? Of course he’s proposing an arbitrary percentage by writing the 1 percent statement as a misleading hypothetical, so in the end he’s simply being disingenuous about the issue.

Facts are essential for gathering and sharing information. If you haven’t got an assurance you’re getting facts, then you enter the fraught areas of lies, exaggerations, guesses, wishful thinking… there are many ways to distort reality.

It’s fair to say that fact-checking can fall short of expectations. Facts are not always lined up and ready to support an idea or a belief. It takes work to fact-check and that means there’s a cost to the fact-checker. A fact used in a misleading context leads to doubts over credibility. New facts may supplant previous facts. All fair enough, but understanding reality isn’t easy. If it were, civilization would be far more advanced by now.

Zuckerberg, however, has an obvious bias of his own in all of this. Meta doesn’t exist to ensure that we have the best information. Meta exists to monetize our participation in its products, such as Facebook. Compare this to Wikipedia, which depends on donations and provides sources for its information.

Zuckerberg argues against the idea of Meta as an arbiter of truth. Yet Meta products are designed to appeal to the entire planet and have contributors from the entire planet. The content of discussions on Meta platforms impacts the core beliefs and actions of millions of people at a time. To treat fact-checking as a disposable feature is absurd. Individuals cannot readily verify global information. Fact-checking is not only a transparent approach for large-scale verification of news and information, it’s an implicit responsibility for anyone, or any entity, that provides global sharing.

Facts are themselves not biased. So what Zuckerberg is really responding to is that fact-checking has appeared to favor some political positions over others. And this is exactly what we would expect in ethical discourse. All viewpoints are not equally valid in politics or in life. In fact, some viewpoints are simply wish lists of ideological will. If Zuckerberg wants to address bias, he needs to start with himself.

As noted, Zuckerberg clearly seems uncomfortable with Meta in a spotlight on the issue of fact-checking. Well, here’s a thought: Meta shouldn’t be deciding whether something is true or not, that’s what fact-checking services take care of. It places the burden of legitimacy on outside sources. The only thing Meta has to arbitrate are the contracts with fact-checking organizations for their fact-checking work. When Zuckerberg derides and discontinues third-party fact-checking he isn’t just insulating Meta from potential controversies. He uncouples the grounding and responsibilities of Meta contributors. As a consequence, stated in his own words, “…we’re going to catch less bad stuff…”

What Zuckerberg proposes instead of fact-checking is something that completely undermines the intrinsic strength of facts and relies instead on negotiation. Based on the Community Notes system on X, Meta only allows “approved” contributors to post challenges to posts. But the notes they post will only be published if other “approved” contributors vote on whether those notes are helpful… then an algorithm further processes the ideological spectrum of all those voting contributors to decide if the note finally gets published. Unsurprisingly, it has been widely reported that the majority of users never see notes correcting content, regardless of the validity of the contributor findings. Zuckerberg argues for free speech, yet Community Notes is effective censorship for suppressing challenges to misinformation.

Clearly, getting to the facts that support our understanding of the realities of our world is increasingly on us as individuals. But it takes effort and time. If our sources of information aren’t willing to verify the legitimacy of that information, our understanding of the world will absolutely become more, rather than less, biased. So the next time Zuckerberg disingenuously prattles on about his hands-off role supporting the First Amendment and unbiased sharing, what he’s really campaigning for is to allow the sea of misinformation to expand exponentially, at the expense of the inevitable targets of malicious derision. Remember, Zuckerberg’s bias is to encourage more discussions by all means, a goal which, for a platform with global reach, is greatly aided by having less moderation. Moderation that protects you at that scale is being undermined. Remember, Zuckerberg said it himself: “…we’re going to catch less bad stuff…”

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OSgrid wiping its database on March 21: You have five weeks to save your stuff

OSgrid’s LBSA Plaza is the cross-roads of the hypergrid and a popular virtual hangout for developers, region owners, and metaverse travelers.

OSgrid is planning a complete inventory reset on March 21, 2024.

That means that if you have an OSgrid avatar or region, you will have five weeks to make a backup of your inventory before everything is permanently deleted.

“All avatars that don’t have a backup of their OSgrid assets elsewhere within now and five weeks will irrevocably lose their complete inventory,” OSgrid secretary Foxx Bode told Hypergrid Business.

Not everything will be wiped, however. User avatars, friend lists, groups, and region locations will remain intact. However, all inventory items including photos, notecards, virtual objects, scripts, and landmarks will be erased during a week-long maintenance period.

The grid’s aging asset database had become a critical burden, with repair processes consuming resources meant for normal operations. Recent attempts to fix corrupted data made only 20% progress over four months.

OSgrid is the largest OpenSim grid by land area, according to last month’s statistics, and the oldest grid in the OpenSim ecosystem. It was founded in 2007, meaning that there’s 18 years’ worth of accumulated stuff in the databases.

“The current database is a massive burden to the grid,” OSgrid administrators stated in their announcement. “Sixty percent of it is probably never used, and it kills the performance of our state-of-the-art hardware,”

Impact felt across OpenSim

The announcement triggered immediate migrations across OpenSim. Wolf Territories Grid reported over 100 new regions in recent days, while some smaller grids temporarily blocked incoming transfers to prevent system overload.

Wolf Territories was the most popular OpenSim grid as of last month.

“People have strong opinions and think the metaverse is some competition, but we really appreciate the help for our users,” Bode said, while warning smaller grids against accepting more users than their infrastructure could handle.

Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner highlighted his grid’s stable infrastructure amid the disruption.

“Kitely has been up since March 2011 and has never suffered asset server or inventory loss,” he said, pointing to the grid’s cloud-based system using Amazon S3 and CloudFront services. All content is backed up daily, he added.

Kitely, the third-largest grid by land area, also serves as OpenSim’s main content marketplace.

There are currently 20,954 product listings in Kitely Market containing 41,054 product variations, 35,814 of which are exportable to other grids. Kitely Market users can have their purchases automatically delivered to avatars on other grids. Kitely Market has delivered orders to 642 OpenSim grids to date, Tochner said.
Kitely Market also provides merchants with a tool that can help their customers regain items that were bought for avatars that belong to grids that have shut down or suffered inventory loss, he said.

Backup options

OSgrid users and residents have several options to secure their content.

First, there’s a market on LBSA plaza with instructions on how to export your own avatar inventories as IAR files and entire regions as OAR files.

Second, if you have an avatar on another grid, you can open up two viewers and teleport that second avatar to the same place as your OSgrid avatar and just pass inventory items from one to the other.

Third, OSgrid is putting up some regions where people can create boxes to hold their stuff. These boxes will then go into OAR files.

Finally, as a last resort, the grid has an automated tool for exporting user inventories as an IAR file. This file can be uploaded to avatars on other grids, or re-uploaded back to OSgrid once the database reset is complete. However, OSgrid only has 20 slots a day for these backups, so the tool won’t be made publicly available.

If you need help with any of these, you can find in-world assistance from hosts, including Unadecal, Prince, Paela, and Kristina. There is often someone around to help on the grid’s LBSA Plaza region, also known as the crossroads of the hypergrid.

It’s hypergrid address is hg.osgrid.org:80:Lbsa Plaza.

OSgrid plans to resume operations March 28 with rebuilt database infrastructure. New user registration will remain closed until the process is completed.

Bode asked that users be considerate moving their stuff temporarily to other grids, especially smaller grid or free and open grids.

“Ask the grid owner upfront if its okay to load full regions or large inventories,” he said. “Not all grids have the capacity or means to process an influx of users with large inventories — and the storage consequences — and the very last thing we want is a domino effect of smaller grids suffering asset problems.”

“Personally, I’m very grateful the other big grids — amongst others Wolf and Alternate Metaverse jump to mind — are helping out with OSgrid‘s residents,” he added.

About OSgrid

Founded in 2007, OSgrid is one of the oldest and largest OpenSim virtual worlds. As a non-profit organization, it provides free land and resources to users, serving as a testing ground for OpenSim development and a hub for virtual communities.

The grid operates on open-source software and allows users to connect regions hosted on their own computers. This open architecture contributed to its growth but also led to challenges managing the accumulated data from nearly two decades of operation.

Meanwhile, the grid relies on donations to pay for its infrastructure and is run entirely by volunteers.

OSgrid has had problems before. In 2014 and 2015 the grid was down for several months and a significant number of assets were lost.

On a separate note

I won’t be doing a stats report this month, or in the foreseeable future. After all these years, I still haven’t found a way to fully automate the process and it takes a lot of manual work every month!

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OpenSim activity up with the new year

All the OpenSim stats were up this month, as both land area, active users, and registered users all increased compared to mid-December 2024.

The land area of the public OpenSim grids went up more than 100 standard region equivalents, active users were up by more than 600 — and the grids reported over 4,100 new registrations.

Active user are the total number of unique visitors to a grid, both local and hypergrid. Registered users are people who have signed up for accounts on a grid, and is usually a positive sign of people’s commitment to a grid — and an early indication of future land rentals.

The numbers were up even though some grids didn’t publish their stats this month, including Moonrose, which had more than 900 actives in October. In addition, the OpenSimulator Community Conference grid lost nearly 300 actives because the grid hosted an annual conference the month before, and that traffic is now gone.

I am now tracking a total of 2,670 public grids, of which 300 were active this month and 246 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 35,873 standard region equivalents, with a gain of more than 250 new regions, while Wolf Territories Grid was the most active, with 7,932 unique visitors over the past 30 days.

OpenSim land area for January, 2025. (Hypergrid Business data.)

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.

Discovery Grid leaves OpenSim for new virtual world platform

Discovery Grid is still in the process of shutting down, but a few people are still visiting the grid, probably as part of getting all their stuff migrated.

You can read more about it here.

Hypergrid Business now on BlueSky

And we now have a BlueSky account: @HypergridBusiness.

Here are a few other folks to follow:

You can see everyone HGB is following here.

Leave a note in the comments if you have a BlueSky account and want people to be able to follow you, or if you know of a grid that does.

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.

Get our monthly stats and all other OpenSim news delivered right to your mailbox every month.

We don’t spam! Read our privacy policy for more info.

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: 7,932 active users
  2. OSgrid: 4,743 active users
  3. GBG World: 2,512 active users
  4. Darkheart’s Playground: 2,277 active users
  5. Alternate Metaverse: 2,253 active users
  6. DigiWorldz: 2,068 active users
  7. WaterSplash: 1,531 active users
  8. Sciattisi Grid: 1,451 active users
  9. AvatarLife: 1,041 active users
  10. Trianon World: 998 active users
  11. Neverworld: 922 active users
  12. AviVerse AlterEgo: 915 active users
  13. AviWorlds: 871 active users
  14. Littlefield: 825 active users
  15. Party Destination Grid: 811 active users
  16. NakedWorldz: 797 active users
  17. Groovy Verse: 689 active users
  18. Eureka World: 570 active users
  19. Craft World: 556 active users
  20. Herederos Grid: 546 active users
  21. Astralia: 541 active users
  22. Gentle Fire Grid: 512 active users
  23. ZetaWorlds: 495 active users
  24. Vivo Sim: 478 active users
  25. Kitely: 456 active users

Online marketplaces for OpenSim content

There are currently 20,965 product listings in Kitely Market containing 41071 product variations, 35833 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 637 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.

Last month, the numbers went down a little bit.

“Unfortunately a few stores were disabled because their owners passed away a long time ago and we lost the ability to transfer their sales earnings to them,” Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner told Hypergrid Business. “In most cases, we don’t do this as people’s next of kin take over their accounts and shut them down themselves, or keep those accounts active and update the PayPal payout address in order to enable us to transfer those stores’ earnings to them.”

This is a reminder to all of us to make provisions for our online accounts, especially those that are generating revenues.

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: BloodMoon, Doghouse, Gaming Friends, Life Grid, Medieval Fantasy, New Horizon, SpaceGrid, The Hub Grid, and Xenolandia.

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

Suspended grids

The following grids were marked as suspended this month: 3World, CyberCity, CyberDataStorm, Eenhgrid, KittyBlue, Mysterious Grid 2, SunEden Resort, Virtual Gay Pride, and Virtual 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.

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.

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OpenSim land area, active users up for the holidays

Both land area and active users increased this month in OpenSim, possibly because people are spending more time inside, where it’s warm.

But who knows, really, why people do what they do?

Anyway, I am now tracking a total of 2,6617 public grids, of which 290 were active this month and 231 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 35,614 standard region equivalents, with a gain of more than 2,700 new regions, while Wolf Territories Grid was the most active, with 7,737 unique visitors over the past 30 days.

OpenSim land area for Dec. 2024. (Hypergrid Business data.)

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.

Discovery Grid leaves OpenSim for new virtual world platform

This big news today is that Discovery Grid is shutting down. The plan is for it to reopen on the O3DE platform, which Amazon created then donated to the open source community.

You can read more about it here.

Hypergrid Business now on BlueSky

And we now have a BlueSky account: @HypergridBusiness.

Here are a few other folks to follow:

You can see everyone HGB is following here.

Leave a note in the comments if you have a BlueSky account and want people to be able to follow you, or if you know of a grid that does.

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.

Get our monthly stats and all other OpenSim news delivered right to your mailbox every month.

We don’t spam! Read our privacy policy for more info.

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: 7,737 active users
  2. OSgrid: 4,262 active users
  3. GBG World: 2,548 active users
  4. Alternate Metaverse: 2,357 active users
  5. Darkheart’s Playground: 2,192 active users
  6. DigiWorldz: 2,140 active users
  7. WaterSplash: 1,633 active users
  8. Trianon World: 1,142 active users
  9. AviWorlds: 1,073 active users
  10. Neverworld: 1,065 active users
  11. AviVerse AlterEgo: 1,018 active users
  12. Sciattisi Grid: 830 active users
  13. Party Destination Grid: 826 active users
  14. Littlefield: 761 active users
  15. Craft World: 717 active users
  16. AvatarLife: 656 active users
  17. Gentle Fire Grid: 621 active users
  18. Eureka World: 615 active users
  19. Groovy Verse: 613 active users
  20. Herederos Grid: 582 active users
  21. ZetaWorlds: 529 active users
  22. NakedWorldz: 512 active users
  23. Kitely: 511 active users
  24. Astralia: 484 active users
  25. Kishaki: 455 active users

Online marketplaces for OpenSim content

There are currently 20,998 product listings in Kitely Market containing 41,138 product variations, 35,902 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 634 OpenSim grids to date.

(Data courtesy Kitely.)

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.

Last month, the numbers went down a little bit.

“Unfortunately a few stores were disabled because their owners passed away a long time ago and we lost the ability to transfer their sales earnings to them,” Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner told Hypergrid Business. “In most cases, we don’t do this as people’s next of kin take over their accounts and shut them down themselves, or keep those accounts active and update the PayPal payout address in order to enable us to transfer those stores’ earnings to them.”

This is a reminder to all of us to make provisions for our online accounts, especially those that are generating revenues.

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

No new grids were added to the database in the past 30 days.

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

Suspended grids

The following 10 grids were marked as suspended this month: Alterlifes, Bernicia, Dominator, DowGrid, Goldor Grid, GorGrid, Nova Space, The City, Thrae, and Uzuri Virtual.

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.

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.

Posted on

Discovery Grid moves from OpenSim to O3DE alternative

Discovery Grid. (Image courtesy Discovery Grid via Facebook.)

Discovery Grid, which had been in OpenSim for more than a dozen years, is moving today to the Open 3D Engine platform, also known as O3DE.

In his announcement, grid owner Rene Vega — also known as Balpien Hammerer in-world — cited declining user engagement and the limitations of OpenSim technology as key factors in the decision. Statistics showed active accounts had dropped to 26 percent of their 2019 levels, while monthly active users fell to 19 percent and total regions decreased to 55 percent of their previous numbers, he said.

“It is clear to me that this grid needs new experiences. It needs the means to ease the development effort by creatives; modern tools are required,” Vega said. “Unfortunately OpenSim lacks these tools.”

The transition to O3DE promises significant technical improvements, including more land space—equivalent to 32,768 standard-sized regions—along with advanced features like realistic ocean dynamics, volumetric clouds, and PhysX5 physics simulation.

To ensure an orderly closure, Discovery Grid implemented a 90-day transition plan, offering free region backups to all landowners and coordinating with the Utopia Skye grid to facilitate inventory transfers for users.

Rather than a complete shutdown, Vega positioned this move as a strategic pivot, stating the business would continue under a new virtual world platform based on O3DE technology. However, no specific timeline was provided for the launch of the new platform.

The closure reflects broader challenges within the OpenSimulator ecosystem, particularly regarding viewer compatibility issues and the platform’s struggle to keep pace with modern virtual world capabilities. Discovery Grid’s transition marks one of the first major moves by an established virtual world from OpenSimulator to the newer O3DE platform.

What is O3DE?

O3DE initially began as Amazon Lumberyard, built on top of the CryEngine game platform technology.

Amazon donated the project to the Linux Foundation in 2021, and O3DE became fully open sourced, with an Apache license.

It is a partner of the Linux-based Open Metaverse Foundation, which was launched in January of 2023, so, at some point, it might support teleports between worlds.

 

You can check out the showcase of O3DE examples here. There’s not much there yet. A couple of empty city builds, some robotics simulations, and a couple of game demos. None link to anything you can easily access online, though a couple do take you to a GitHub project page. I can’t find any examples of worlds built with O3DE that you can actually visit.

Plus, Unity and Unreal both have free options. Unreal, a high-end game development engine, is free if you have less than $1 million in annual revenues. Unity, popular for web and mobile apps, is free for individuals and companies that have less than $200,000 in revenues.

Is OpenSim losing steam?

Back in 2007, Second Life users figured out how the viewer communicated with back-end servers. This enabled people to build bots for Second Life, and to create alternative viewers to the official one.

Meanwhile, enterprises were getting very excited about the possibility of using Second Life for productivity, training, product prototyping, marketing, and customer support. However, they didn’t want their users in the public Second Life system, with all its gambling and nudity and financial scams. They needed a secure, private environment for their customers and employees.

So IBM and Intel and a few other companies and volunteer developers built a brand new server infrastructure that used the same viewer communication protocols as Second Life. That way, it could be accessed through all the Second Life-compatible viewers. On the back end, however, it was completely different and built from scratch. It even used a different programming language and architecture.

People were excited about being able to have their own private worlds — and to build commercial alternatives to Second Life.

Then, in 2008, Christa Lopes, a computing professor at UC Irvine, invented the hypergrid, and many of these new worlds became hyperlinked.

But then something bad happened.

Companies realized that there wasn’t all that much benefit to doing stuff in virtual worlds. There were better platforms for virtual prototyping and video calls were much more convenient for meetings. OpenSim had a high learning curve.

The way big, complex open source projects normally work is that they have a big community of developers that contributes new fixes and bug fixes. These developers generally come out of the user base. The more users, the more developers. Since most users are not themselves developers, and even those who are have other stuff to work on, you need a very large user base in order to continue innovating.

In particular, having large enterprises like IBM use the platform is key, because they can assign developers to work on the project. It’s not just out of the goodness of their hearts, of course — they want to make sure that a project they use a lot isn’t abandoned, and also that it evolves in a direction they like.

Without corporate backing, and without a large, passionate user base, OpenSim development slowed down significantly.

But so did Second Life.

The learning curve was too steep, the usability wasn’t there, and the benefits were not readily apparent. The technology was supposed to go viral but never did. People tried it out, says, “hey, that’s cool,” and then never went back to it.

Kind of like me with my giant collection of virtual reality headsets.

And OpenSim is way too slow and expensive to be used as a gaming engine. Successful video games need to be able to support thousands of players, at least, with no lag. And, of course, OpenSim has no built-in game mechanics.

As a result, there have been only minor, incremental improvements over the past decade. Teleportation improved. Stability improved. Graphics slightly improved. But basically, anyone who used Second Life or OpenSim ten years ago will find it pretty much the same today.

The usability hasn’t improved. The learning curve is no shorter. There’s still no decent web viewer or mobile viewer.

And, other than some kind of emotional connection to OpenSim and the desire to see it survive, there’s no real motivation for change. For current users, OpenSim and Second Life are fine the way they are. They liked it ten years ago and they still like it.

There’s no killer use case out there that people are clamoring for.

For me, OpenSim is now retro. Like text-based games or eight-bit graphics.

I’m a little sad about it. I’ve spent 15 years writing about OpenSim and used to think that it was the future of interactivity. But I don’t have my own grid anymore, and rarely go into OpenSim for meetings or events these days — so I can see why grid owners might be looking at alternatives.

The one big thing I’ll miss if there’s a big migration to something like O3DE is the hypergrid. Maybe Crista Lopes can take a look at it and see what she can do.

What about you? Are you planning to check out O3DE? What do you think about the future of OpenSim?

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Breaking news: Philip Rosedale to speak at OSCC on Sunday

Second Life founder Philip Rosedale is coming to OpenSim tomorrow, Sunday Dec. 8, at 4 p.m. Pacific Time for a fireside chat at the OpenSimulator Community Conference.

Rosedale founded Linden Lab in 1999 and continues innovating in virtual worlds.

Watch the conversation in person at the OSCC conference grid, hypergrid address cc.opensimulator.org:8002.

You can also watch the event live on YouTube.

View the full conference schedule here.

Register for a local account here.

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OpenSimulator Community Conference starts today

(Image courtesy OpenSim Community Conference.)

The OpenSimulator Community Conference, starts today with music and celebrations, then gets off to its full start tomorrow morning with a welcome panel with OpenSim core developers at 7 a.m. Pacific time tomorrow morning.

You can see the full schedule here.

You can also watch the presentations live streamed at AvaCon’s YouTube channel.

The conference is free to attend in person on the Open Simulator Conference grid, and you can register here or hypergrid to attend.

The hypergrid address is cc.opensimulator.org:8002.

Follow @opensimcc on X or on BlueSky and use the hashtags #OSCC24 or #oscc, and post your conference pictures and snapshots on our Flickr and Facebook group, or join the Discord server where you can also chat with other attendees during and after the event.

This year’s conference features over 55 speakers sharing innovative content, dynamic short presentations, and panels that all take place on Saturday, December 7, and Sunday, December 8, within the grid’s OSCC Keynote regions.

The schedule also includes live music, community and social events, and plenty of Expo regions to explore over the weekend. Don’t miss OSCC presenter booths located in OSCC Expo Zone 3 and the special hypergrid resources located in the OSCC Expo Zone 2 region with many how-to’s and scavenger hunt landmarks to interesting destinations where you can learn to hypergrid visit throughout the OpenSimulator metaverse.

There is also the chance to attend live music during Friday afternoon and Saturday evening #OSCC24 Music Showcase and on Sunday at the virtual venue of Maritime Club Belfast, as well as many post-conference community events and simulation tours.

Read more about the conference here.

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OpenSim user growth cools down with chilly weather

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.

OpenSim land area for Nov. 2024. (Hypergrid Business data.)

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.

Get our monthly stats and all other OpenSim news delivered right to your mailbox every month.

We don’t spam! Read our privacy policy for more info.

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: 7,379 active users
  2. OSgrid: 4,046 active users
  3. GBG World: 2,498 active users
  4. DigiWorldz: 2,190 active users
  5. Alternate Metaverse: 2,058 active users
  6. Darkheart’s Playground: 2,011 active users
  7. WaterSplash: 1,497 active users
  8. Trianon World: 1,092 active users
  9. Neverworld: 1,042 active users
  10. AviVerse AlterEgo: 1,020 active users
  11. AviWorlds: 994 active users
  12. Astralia: 867 active users
  13. Littlefield: 861 active users
  14. Party Destination Grid: 822 active users
  15. AvatarLife: 672 active users
  16. Groovy Verse: 605 active users
  17. Eureka World: 595 active users
  18. NakedWorldz: 576 active users
  19. SunEden Resort: 553 active users
  20. Gentle Fire Grid: 514 active users
  21. Herederos Grid: 494 active users
  22. Kitely: 462 active users
  23. ZetaWorlds: 452 active users
  24. Jungle Friends Grid: 434 active users
  25. 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.

 

(Data courtesy Kitely.)

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.

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.

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Registration now open for December’s OpenSim Community Conference

(Image courtesy Avacon.)

The Opensimulator Community Conference is the annual conference that focuses on the user community and developers of the OpenSimulator virtual world software.

This year’s conference will run from December 6 to December 8, 2024.

Registration is now open, and is free.

OSCC 2024 kicks off with a Friday pre-conference launch event featuring meetups, art, live music, and DJ sets, and then two days of fast-paced presentations, panels, performances, and immersive tours spotlighting the technical, scholarly, artistic, commercial, and community-produced works across diverse sectors of the OpenSimulator user base.

There will also be the opportunity to explore community events, tours, and workshops leading up to and following the conference weekend.

OpenSimulator is an open-source, multi-platform, multi-user 3D application server. It can be used to create a virtual environment (or world) that is accessible through a variety of clients on multiple protocols. Users can also visit other OpenSimulator virtual worlds across the web by using the Hypergrid protocols. In this way, it is the basis of an open-distributed Metaverse.

Find more info, including the schedule, once released at conference.opensimulator.org.

(Image courtesy Avacon.)

The conference is hosted on an OpenSimulator grid specifically designed for the conference.

We hope to be able to accommodate over 400 users in total, which includes speakers, sponsors, and staff.

Since virtual seats are limited, registration is open on a first-come-first-served basis until the maximum number of virtual conference center tickets is reached. At that point, community members will still be able to register for the live-streamed version of the conference that will be available.

The expo area will not be ticketed and can be accessed by any avatar, subject to constraints on the number of avatars that the exhibition regions can hold at any particular time.