Web Information Systems Engineering

Abstract

Decentralized social networks have attracted the attention of a large number of researchers with their promises of scalability, privacy, and ease of adoption. Yet, current implementations require users to install specific software to handle the protocols they rely on. The WebRTC framework holds the promise of removing this requirement by making it possible to run peer-to-peer applications directly within web browsers without the need of any external software or plugins. In this demo, we present WebGC, a WebRTC-based library that supports gossip-based communication between web browsers and enables them to operate with Node-JS applications. Due to their inherent scalability, gossip-based protocols constitute a key component of a large number of decentralized applications including social networks. We therefore hope that WebGC can represent a useful tool for developers and researchers. (A previous version of this demo appeared in [8]. Since then, we have integrated the library with a new decentralized signaling service and introduced support for web workers.)