The growth of Diaspora - A decentralized online social network in the wild

The Diaspora network [1] is a recently launched decentralized online social network with over 216; 000 users as of November 16; 2011. It is a network of independent, federated Diaspora servers that are administrated by individual users who allow Diaspora users' profiles to be hosted on their servers. In this paper we take a first look at the Diaspora network's overall growth in terms of number of users, the topology of its interconnected servers, and the reliability of those servers. We also present a simple analysis to explain the growth of the Diaspora network. Our timely measurement study of a real-world decentralized online social network sheds light on the evolution of such a network in practice, and provides valuable observations and insights that can help the future design and implementation of decentralized online social networking.