Search the Community

A thing I have been seeing for quite a while now is the question of "Is Second Life dying?", or statements that outright state it is. I am a researcher into a lot of Second Life related things. Be it from studying the protocol to better document it, to archiving historical content, to looking deeper into the Grid status to see what is normally unseen. Today, I bring my research to the public for a informative look into the question "Is Second Life dying?". I'm going to divide this research into three key parts: Concurrent residents Region/Grid growth New resident sign-up rate My poor understanding economy Summary 1. Concurrent residents Firstly, the statement that Second Life doesn't have as many people as it used to. After scraping historical data from web.archive.org, as well as my personal database: Apr 2007 19,005 Apr 2008 34,685 Mar 2009 68,710 Jul 2010 42,990 Aug 2011 33,628 May 2012 36,854 Aug 2013 32,974 May 2014 38,056 May 2015 39,336 Jul 2016 39,031 Jul 2017 31,930 Nov 2018 45,301 Mar 2019 44,854 Jan 2020 34,133 Feb 2020 50,936 Just yesterday we had 50,936(Feb 2020) concurrent residents! Within the past year, the max concurrent residents we have seen is 54,336, which is nearly comparable to March 2009's 68,700 residents. This isn't counting individual logins, which is likely a lot higher. I say we have had around the same amount of people as we have always had. NOTE: Data from <2017 are before I was recording it myself, and was gathered from web.archive.org. As such, this isn't the peak data, but data gathered from when their web crawlers ran. Second Life sees less people during EU/Asia hours, and more people during American hours. 2. Region/Grid growth Now let's take a look at the Grid, which I think serves as a great look into the health of Second Life. The grid is indeed growing, which I feel means resident's are trusting in Second Life enough to invest into private regions. This means the region appearance to disappearance ratio is in favour of appearance. Don't just take my word for it, here is a (big and poorly made(I am a computer scientist, not layout artist)) gif of the public region zone of the grid(You can even see the addition of Bellisseria!): Full images are here (CAUTION: These images are 2048x2048 in size): https://agni.softhyena.com/static/agni-2020-03-01.png https://agni.softhyena.com/static/agni-2018-09-07.png https://agni.softhyena.com/static/agni-2018-09-07-to-2020-03-01.gif Color key: Region Restricted Available Bordered Cart Bulk Reservation Missing Data Please note this data is gathered using a very rudimentary and unintended way. Color key may be incorrect for some or a lot of regions. (EG: Regions showing as cart entries, or missing data appearing in some grid tiles). A region doesn't guarantee it to be online, it simply means "A region exists here and hasn't been deleted"(Deleted meaning, someone stopped paying for it and LL has no reason to keep it around in the dataserver). Typically they exist and are set to be online, but some regions(EG: Ajax Arena) are set to not come online. This also shows regions that are not publicly accessible. This also only has from 0, 0 to 2048, 2048 in region coordinates(The grid is 65535 by 65535 in region coordinates!), which appears to be the area of the grid that is used. Unless LL is willing to give me a copy of the data, researching past there will take a whole day of data mining and strain on the servers. 3. New resident sign-up rate As for new resident sign-up rate. It is still quite high! Just within the past 24 hours of making this post, the average sign-ups per hour is 544 (Rounded). While yes, some of these are probably bots, I still see tons of people in new resident landing spots who actually go through the tutorial instead of teleporting out, which tells me there is still a lot of interest in Second Life! My reasoning behind this is: New residents will actually go through the tutorial, where as people registering alts or bots will simply teleport out to skip the tutorial. 4. My poor understanding economy Finally, I would go into economy, but I am not a economist, I am a computer scientist. I don't have enough knowledge on economy to make a decision on whether or not Second Life's economy is doing good. With that said, read the next line under the assumption I have no clue what I am talking about. If I had to take a guess, I'd say MAYBE it could be doing better. I've seen L$ to USD ratio going up, but I've also seen times where it goes down. I'd suspect the economy will correct it's self and prices for stuff will go up in L$, but will remain the same for USD. 5. In summary Second Life most isn't dead, and it most certainly isn't dying. If anything, I'd say it is thriving. We are seeing new regions and residents, as well as plentiful concurrent users. I hope this clears any concerns that "Second Life is dying". It may not have as much media coverage as it did back during the times of IBM, CNET, The Office, or CSI, but the resident base is still here and is growing. Footnotes All my statistics are publicly available. If someone wishes to have a copy of this, please let me know in-world and I'll give you a copy of the raw data. As for those asking why I obsess over data collection, autism/aspergers lol. You can view my recorded/public statistics at https://agni.softhyena.com/stats. View the page source for API information. Region statistics is very very big, and because of this, it will kill my measly 100KiB/s upload rate. Please ask for a link and I'll give it to you. The data, while gathered by me for research purposes, is copyright to Linden Lab. Please properly attribute them when using it.