So first let’s talk about donations/support, I have said many times I will grow the pod as long as the costs are covered. I have seen 1 new subscription and 9 drop this year so far in these first 3 months. I expect the drops as people pod hop etc. But we have had about 7000 people sign up this year so far and only 1 throw out support. So just a gentle reminder that the pod needs funds to keep it going at this rate and not have ads etc. Always open to your feedback on this, I know paying for a social network is a new idea, but even a buck a month helps pay the costs!

So speaking of growth, we are now spread on 3 severs and show have capacity for the rest of the year. Here is a Network Map I made so you can see the basic setup.

Project wise the Diaspora team has grown more, make sure you are watching things like:

http://blog.diasporafoundation.org/

http://devblog.joindiaspora.com/

https://github.com/diaspora/diaspora/wiki/Changelog

Can’t wait for Beta and see this network explode!

The Weather here in Seattle is cold, hope everyone else is seeing some sign of spring!

David

In case you missed it, Diaspora* has 2 new members, Sean Tilley and Dennis Collinson. See the main D* blog for more http://blog.diasporafoundation.org/ I am excited to see more momentum and more communication from the core team!

I confirmed today that we will see the diasporaHQ@joindiaspora.com account back in action soon, that will be great since we are all connected to it and its the best central source of information. The account is so connected that sending messages from it crushes the system, they are working to fix that now.

Also for you into the development of Diaspora see the dev blog at http://devblog.joindiaspora.com/

If you have not seen it diasp.eu has some nice stats on user numbers, see it at https://diasp.eu/stats.html

We have also seen the user base about double this year, check out diasp.eu’s nice estimate tool: stats

Its obvously been a hard end to the year with the loss of Ilya. But it looks like the Diaspora Dudes are healing and on track to get a beta out the door next year.

The diasp.org pod seems rock solid right now and we had a day with 80k hits and all was humming along, 2 dedicated servers seem the right combo for now. Think we are set for next year and think we will see a lot of users setup their own pods and migrate to pods closer to home. I am always happy to help folks setup pods! Its getting quite easy now with current distros like Fedora 16 and Centos 6.x

Thanks to all for donations, and for promoting Diaspora. I am excited for next year, for Beta and for lots of new users!

Have a good Holiday season and a Happy New year!

David

Just like all other pods we are growing, growing fast as Diaspora is just about to go Beta this month things are speeding up with lots and lots of #newhere folks! I have been trying to friend and greet as much as I can.

To all that have donated, thank you! It has grown past the point I can email you all 1 by one with a personal thank you. Your support has us ad free and scaling to meet demand. Just last night I moved the DB to a 2nd server just for the DB, pod is way faster today! If you have not supported please consider it, its how diasp.org pod will continue to grow and survive, options for subscriptions even at $1 a month are very helpful. We are now on 2 dedicated servers, both the same: 8gig memory, 4 core cpu X 3.2ghz, 250gig drives. Backups run nightly and sync to the podupti.me server, and to a shared hosting platform, so I have 2 local and 2 remote backups every day.

You may have noticed I had to stop Piwik stats as it was slowing things down to much and could not handle the traffic well, I am using new relic for some stats and performance optimization. Some static content is on a Rackspace CDN now also. I am trying to avoid Amazon/Google items as much as I can as I know most users to not want their data there. I will look at other hosted Analytic options this week, I need something that can handle the traffic and do not want to have to scale stats servers for Piwik, think that’s a bad use of your donation money.

I have been using a new VPS provider for stats and other boxes for a few months now (wanted to put the DB on one, but realized that needed to be in the same data center as the main pod) and I have a small private pod running on a VPS with them with 512memory and its under $4 a month. they have nodes in France, Germany and the US. If you are thinking of your own pod check them out as an option. Aff link: https://secure.uptimevps.co/aff.php?aff=071

I chatted with Daniel Grippi yesterday and went over how I am scaling and it looks like diasp.org is ready for the beta traffic. Thanks for the time, Grippi!

I hope you are all having fun with Diaspora! I am on the road still, was in AZ now in NC, home next week… I just may share the photo of me as a pumpkin ghost that my neices and nephews dressed me as. If your not connected to me: http://dia.so/david

P.S. Some stats on new users on diasp.org:

• Week stating on 2011-09-05 , 1141
• Week stating on 2011-09-12 , 1293
• Week stating on 2011-09-19 , 3216
• Week stating on 2011-09-26 , 2461
• Week stating on 2011-10-03 , 1131
• Week stating on 2011-10-10 , 1616
• Week stating on 2011-10-17 , 924
• Week stating on 2011-10-24 , 697

I have offered others to use it, but no one has bitten, that’s ok! I did just launch a profile shortner on the main dia.so page. Idea is to simplify connecting with others via a central hub. Since it sets a cookie with your pod name it would be a nice central hub for things, all things! If you have created something or know someone that has that “needs to know” the users pod to work properly please suggest it!

Click him to download the app! (creepy Diaspora Eyes!) Sorry I can not put it in the market yet, http://www.appinventorbeta.com is bugged and they are working to fix it!

The Diaspora dudes are plugging along and making things better! I got ejabberd xmpp server stuff set up in prep for them pulling that into the master, think its close.

I updated podupti.me just a bit, some looks and some back end code. I put the Translate script up on github.

This week I moved DNS over to dnsmadeeasy.com for ns since we have had 5 outages from namecheap and done dealing with DNS issues. Think I will stick to namecheap for domains and ssl certs for now.

Some stats for the pod!

Users in db: 23,660 (~15,000 are active in the last 2 months)

Database size: 2.6gb

Photo size: 12.3gb

Photo count: 124,396

Piwik overview last 30 days:

41363 returning visits

194430 actions by the returning visits

4.7 actions per returning visit

8 min 29s average visit duration for returning visitors

44% returning visits have bounced (left the website after one page)

Still working massive work weeks so not a ton of time to play and learn more ruby..

David

Via mobile, sorry if worded bad.

David

I personally have been working on other things and not done any coding, maybe work will let up someday and I can play some more.. but for now how about some graphs!

Traffic (about 8k a week):

Growth (about 500 a week):

So it looks like even with the Google+ launch we are up in signups and visits!

My main connection, http://www.wholesaleinternet.com/

I store my pod database backups and photo backups at another host I use,  http://order.1and1.com/xml/order/PrivacyPolicy