Survey on Decentralized Online Social Networks

International audience<p>Because of growing popularity of Online Social Networks (OSNs) and huge amount of sensitiveshared data, preserving privacy is becoming a major issue for OSN users. While mostOSNs rely on a centralized architecture, with an omnipotent Service Provider, severaldecentralized architectures have recently been proposed for decentralized OSNs (DOSNs).In this work, we present a survey of existing proposals. We propose a classification of previouswork under two dimensions: (i) types of approaches with respect to resource provisioningdevices and (ii) adopted strategies for three main technical issues for DOSN(decentralizing storage of content, access control and interaction/signaling). We pointout advantages and limitations of each approach and conclude with a discussion on theimpact of DOSNs on users, OSN providers and other stakeholders