Peer-to-Peer Netw. Appl. DOI 10.1007/s12083-014-0258-2 A taxonomy of decentralized online social networks

Abstract Despite their tremendous success, centrally con-trolled cloud-based Online Social Networks (OSNs) have inherent issues related to user privacy and control. These issues have motivated researchers to make a paradigm shift in the OSN architecture by proposing to replace centrally controlled OSNs with Decentralized OSNs (DOSNs) in a peer-to-peer setting. DOSNs give users more autonomy and the chance to participate in social networks without loosing control over their data. The various DOSN proposals have significant differences in their proposed services, architec-ture and extent of decentralization. In this survey, we study a number of proposals for peer-to-peer DOSNs, distil a set of criteria to compare them, and provide a taxonomy for their comparison