Challenges in the Decentralised Web: The Mastodon Case∗ Aravindh Raman1, Sagar Joglekar1, Emiliano De Cristofaro2;3, Nishanth Sastry1, and Gareth Tyson3;4 1King’s College London, 2University College London, 3Alan Turing Institute, 4Queen Mary University of London faravindh.raman,sagar.joglekar,
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[email protected] Abstract cols to let instances interact and aggregate their users to offer a globally integrated service. The Decentralised Web (DW) has recently seen a renewed mo- DW platforms intend to offer a number of benefits. For ex- mentum, with a number of DW platforms like Mastodon, Peer- ample, data is spread among many independent instances, thus Tube, and Hubzilla gaining increasing traction. These offer al- possibly making privacy-intrusive data mining more difficult. ternatives to traditional social networks like Twitter, YouTube, Data ownership is more transparent, and the lack of centralisa- and Facebook, by enabling the operation of web infrastruc- tion could make the overall system more robust against techni- ture and services without centralised ownership or control. cal, legal or regulatory attacks. Although their services differ greatly, modern DW platforms mostly rely on two key innovations: first, their open source However, these properties may also bring inherent chal- software allows anybody to setup independent servers (“in- lenges that are difficult to avoid, particularly when consid- stances”) that people can sign-up to and use within a local ering the natural pressures towards centralisation in both so- community; and second, they build on top of federation pro- cial [12, 49] and economic [42] systems.