A survey on decentralized Online Social Networks

Abstract

Because of growing popularity of Online Social Networks (OSNs) and huge amount of sensitive shared data, preserving privacy is becoming a major issue for OSN users. While most OSNs rely on a centralized architecture, with an omnipotent Service Provider, several decentralized architectures have recently been proposed for decentralized OSNs (DOSNs). In this work, we present a survey of existing proposals. We propose a classification of previous work under two dimensions: (i) types of approaches with respect to resource provisioning devices and (ii) adopted strategies for three main technical issues for DOSN (decentralizing storage of content, access control and interaction/signaling). We point out advantages and limitations of each approach and conclude with a discussion on the impact of DOSNs on users, OSN providers and other stakeholders.