Decentralized Online Social Network Architectures

Abstract

In recent years, online social networks have become very popular. Online social networks (OSN) have been useful to find former classmates or to improve our interaction with friends. Social networks are also used to establish new relationships with other users, organize events with friends, promote personal work, share multimedia contents, publish comments, or broadcast news. In this way, a huge amount of information is generated and consumed by millions of people via these networks every day. Although the benefits introduced by social networks are well known, these networks still have many challenges. Today popular online social networks are centralized and based on the client-server paradigm. Centralized servers are responsible for managing and storing all information. However, centralized structure introduces several drawbacks in the online social networks such as storage dependence, scalability, security threats, and privacy. P2P infrastructure have emerged as an alternative platform to deploy decentralized online social networks. However, P2P systems are limited by network performance, topology, or vulnerability to security attacks. In this chapter, we review P2P infrastructure as an alternative platform for developing decentralized online social networks. This chapter introduces the benefits of decentralized online social networks and studies its architectures in terms of performance and security.