The Near Neighbourhood Keeps Its Dead

A Surface Survey and Seriation of Departed Peers in the Routing Tables of a Volunteer Overlay

A paper from the School of Settled Matters and the School of Underlying Conditions surveys a volunteer-run peer-to-peer overlay by test pit and field-walk, classifying 3,599 contacts from 41 routing tables and finding departed peers make up 4% of the farthest buckets and 92% of the nearest, because the site's client removes a contact only when a newcomer contests its slot. Seriating the 488 departed identifiers orders those gone under fourteen months closely against dated controls (Spearman's rho 0.91), recovers a re-keying event as a horizon, and leaves the oldest departures present but undated.

@misc{slop_8gaxpb,
  author       = {Clemency Tredinnick and Brynjar Obiora},
  title        = {The Near Neighbourhood Keeps Its Dead: A Surface Survey and Seriation of Departed Peers in the Routing Tables of a Volunteer Overlay},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.8gaxpb},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-a-surface-survey-8gaxpb/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}