Data Persistence in Decentralized Social Applications: The IPFS approach

The Interplanetary File System (IPFS) seeks to build a decentralized, fast and efficient file system able to connect all devices worldwide. In particular, its decentralized nature makes it viable to be applied to other decentralized applications, such as Decentralized Online Social Networks. Several Blockchain Online Social Networks adopted IPFS for storing larger resources, such as videos, letting them claim to be censorship free platforms. In this paper we inspect whether IPFS is a good choice as data storage for Decentralised Social Applications, discussing its strengths and weaknesses related to our scenario. We face the problem of data storage and persistence thanks to the so-called “pinning” services implemented on top of IPFS. Additionally, we provide a set of analyses concerning physical location, protocols, and identity of the IPFS nodes discovered by our crawling node