Abstract The diversity–stability relationship in system dynamics had found significant implication to species evolution in the classical cascade and niche models of the ecosystem. In this paper, the local diversity–stability of the q-snapback network model, which is similar to the cascade and niche models, is investigated by analyzing the eigenvalue distribution near its equilibrium. It is found that the basic diversity–stability feature of the q-snapback network is similar to that of the random-graph network, and to that of the cascade and niche models when their different degree distributions are set to be homogeneous.