  Social media is subject to constant growth and evolution, yet little is known
about their early phases of adoption. To shed light on this aspect, this paper
empirically characterizes the initial and country-wide adoption of a new type
of social media in Saudi Arabia that happened in 2017. Unlike established
social media, the studied network Jodel is anonymous and location-based to form
hundreds of independent communities country-wide whose adoption pattern we
compare. We take a detailed and full view from the operators perspective on the
temporal and geographical dimension on the evolution of these different
communities -- from their very first the first months of establishment to
saturation. This way, we make the early adoption of a new type of social media
visible, a process that is often invisible due to the lack of data covering the
first days of a new network.
