University of Amsterdam Master System and Network Engineering Research Project 2 Functional breakdown of decentralised social networks Student: Supervisor: Wouter Miltenburg Michiel Leenaars
[email protected] [email protected] July 6, 2015 Abstract Current centralised social networks are used by a huge number of users for a variety of reasons. With Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, or Twitter, users are not in control of their own data and access control is centralised and proprietary. Decentralised social networks could be a solution to these problems and gives the control of the data back to users. This research is focused on the question which of the decentralised social networks is currently most suited to be provided as a service by hosting providers. This paper will therefore provide information about the current implementations, the protocols used by the various implementations, and will give a functional breakdown of the various decentralised social networks. Various implementations have been analysed, namely diaspora*, Friendica, GNU social, pump.io, and RedMatrix. The paper also describes the set of standards and protocols used by the various implementations. As most implementations use their own protocol, or implement the standards slightly differently, there is no interoperability without the use of extra plugins or enabling certain features. While there are a lot of standards for facilitating the message exchange, there are however standards missing that would make interoperability possible, which is described in this paper as well. RedMatrix is currently most suited to be provided as an alternative to the current centralised social networks and that can be provided as a service by hosting providers.