Also discussion in this post.

I'm really concerned about this feature regarding privacy, which is why I turned it off again to protect my pod's users.

One can easily track when exactly a new user or a new post appears, even though this data should be hidden imho.

For example, say if Alice promised me to register on pod X, but the user number of that pod didn't increase within the last week, I know that Alice didn't register. Or if the user number of pod X increased by only 1, I know exactly at what time Alice registered. The same is true for posts.

This is a common problem within statistical databases (referring to Stallings).

I share the opinion that there should be a way to make good estimates about the number of people/accounts using Diaspora and obviosly the statistics.json method is a good way to provide those figures. But especially for very small pods (as mine) I consider it a privacy concern if they provide realtime sums for posts. Although small pods are clearly less important for generating network-wide estimates as big pods like geraspora.de or diasp.org, since Diaspora is a decentralized network, there will always be small pods, and, who knows, maybe in the future small pods (<100 accounts) will make up the majority of accounts (although the Pareto principle is more realistic imho - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle).

I'm really keen on providing stats on my pod, but - sorry - not in real time (also not when my pod grows). I cannot provide a service to my users in clear conscience as long as it discloses those real-time sums.

This seems arbitrarily paranoid. While I understand both sides of the story, I will not vote either way on the subject. I don't agree with either side. Honestly, I fought against any statistics in the first place. This, however, is just trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle.

@starblessed Based on what I read in your other posts, you consider a pod's providing statistics about the number of accounts and posts a step into centralizing the network and a step against privacy as such.

I disagree on the decentralization point but I understand your privacy point. You can't have full statistics and full privacy at the same time, those two things are mutually exclusive, just like Heisenberg's uncertanity principle. We have to balance between statistics and privacy - and for proposing dropping all statistics because of privacy issues, one may call you paranoid. ;)