  Recent years have seen several earnest initiatives from both academic
researchers as well as open source communities to implement and deploy
decentralized online social networks (DOSNs). The primary motivations for DOSNs
are privacy and autonomy from big brotherly service providers. The promise of
decentralization is complete freedom for end-users from any service providers
both in terms of keeping privacy about content and communication, and also from
any form of censorship. However decentralization introduces many challenges.
One of the principal problems is to guarantee availability of data even when
the data owner is not online, so that others can access the said data even when
a node is offline or down. In this paper, we argue that a pragmatic design
needs to explicitly allow for and leverage on system heterogeneity, and provide
incentives for the resource rich participants in the system to contribute such
resources. To that end we introduce SuperNova - a super-peer based DOSN
architecture. While proposing the SuperNova architecture, we envision a dynamic
system driven by incentives and reputation, however, investigation of such
incentives and reputation, and its effect on determining peer behaviors is a
subject for our future study. In this paper we instead investigate the efficacy
of a super-peer based system at any time point (a snap-shot of the envisioned
dynamic system), that is to say, we try to quantify the performance of
SuperNova system given any (fixed) mix of peer population and strategies.
