A.: PeerSoN: P2P social networking: early experiences and insights

To address privacy concerns over Online Social Networks (OSNs), we propose a distributed, peer-to-peer approach cou-pled with encryption. Extending the distributed approach by direct data exchange between user devices removes the strict connectivity requirements of web-based OSNs. In order to verify the feasibility of this approach, we designed a two-tiered architecture and protocols that recreate the core fea-tures of OSNs in a decentralized way. This paper focuses on the description of the prototype built for the P2P infrastruc-ture for social networks, as a first step without the encryp-tion part, and shares early experiences from the prototype and insights gained since first outlining the challenges and possibilities of decentralized alternatives to OSNs. 1