RSS SL

1. What's secondlife's real population - Summer of 2025

   Socially, the alarm bells are ringing very loud. We have people expressing frustration at how dead parts of SL are in group chats during peak hours. We're close to a social tipping point where the user drop begins to accelerates due to network effects and sunk cost starts to lose it's hold. I'm not really interested where this year's peak lands late Feb / early March as it's not really a useful or indicative statistic. How SLB's keynotes lands is going to be critical, if Linden phone in a nothing burger like they did last year then we're going to see people making hard decisions. If they don't have reason to show up on stage and do it live (Brad included), we're going to be heading for the door. Core communities will remain at the expense of fringe groups and activities as users rationalize their time and costs. I'm not going to project numbers as that's only going to be used as ammo, but I will say I'm expecting a sharper decline this year and while mobile might prop up some headline numbers, none of that will result in mainstream platform growth. When we hit the lows, the main population is Americans who stay up really late (3 - 5am), there's a small Australian. New Zealand & Japanese cohort that see SL into the EU morning at which point Germany becomes the dominant (non bot) group. The AUS/NZ/JP cohort also have some of the very worst connections to SL, high pings the veers into being intermittent. Suggesting that we might be down to 6k real users & 20k bots at the lowest point in the day is perhaps extreme, but not entirely out of the question. Personally, I would put it closer to 12k human, 14k bot. The daily signups number is absurd, most of those aren't real users who make it in world. We have been seeing more cohorts of "fresh bots" where someone has signed up a hundred accounts on the same day.

2. Your Second Life Power Level is your Inventory Count plus your Age in years. What's yours?

   129,738...and counting.. I quite like that my age in years is just a tiny drop in the ocean though!

3. What's secondlife's real population - Summer of 2025

   There was an SL related site a few years ago to which I no longer have the link, that showed sign ups for years and the steady decline measuring signups in the 100's per month and dropping till the site finally went offline. No Idea of how legit it was but from what others have said and observation, brand new sign ups are probably measured in the 10's or at most in the 100's unless counting bot sign ups.

4. Too specific for the "General Discussion" section and no "General" section here...

   sometimes i shift subjects. switch to still life or landscapes, seeking out what drew me in in the first place. sometimes i take photos that i completely hate every aspect of, saying that i should quit and go home. this is also about when i stop and take a break. this can be weeks, or a couple months. sometimes i also go exploring and see if inspiration strikes.

5. What's secondlife's real population - Summer of 2025

   The number shown is concurrent users, those online now. A more important number is how many are regular users, so unique logins per day, week, month... Only the Lab knows. About 2013 when numbers were going down the Lab stopped providing several metrics. I haven't looked to see if they still publish the number of signups per day. It was a ridiculous number, like 10,000/day... or week or something. As the average time per session is like 3 hours... examining this number every 3 hours would give a reasonable idea of how many singed on in any given period. A guess could be made 8 x 38475 = ~307800 in a day. Consider that SL has players from around the world. The peak concurrent users on is between 2 and 3 PM PT. The lowest logins is 2 to 3 AM PT. That changes by the season. The API I use broke 12/9. So no useful data for December. API came up in early January. Covid broke the trend. Too soon to know if it resumes. The mobile app is pulling some new users. I am on an 80-day streak with mobile. I see ads the Lab is running on games I play on my phone. I think those ads hurt 'retention'. The ads and actual play are WAY different. I think mobile is joust barely ready for Beta. The Lab used to tells us how many signed up, played, and are active in a year. Almost no one believed them. So they may have given that up. My guess is we have 500,000 to 600,000 active per month. Total signups is some astronomical number in the hundred millions. My numbers are about as real as anyone outside the Lab can get. And they are NOT all that accurate nor consistent. In July of 2020 a crash in system caused the big spikes. I've revised my software several times to reject aberrations caused by outages. I had A.I. analyze the data I had and figure out how to best reject aberrations. Now it also tells me when the API fails.