Blogracy: A Peer-to-Peer Social Network

The current approach to build social networking systems is to create huge centralized systems owned by a single company. However, such strategy has many drawbacks, e.g., lack of privacy, lack of anonymity, risks of censorship and operating costs. In this paper the authors propose a novel P2P system that leverages existing, widespread and stable technologies such as DHTs and BitTorrent. In particular, they introduce a key-based identity system and a model of social relations for distributing content efficiently among interested readers. The system they propose, Blogracy, is a micro-blogging social networking system focused on: (i) anonymity and resilience to censorship; (ii) authenticatable content; (iii) semantic interoperability using activity streams. The authors have implemented the system and conducted various experiments to study its behaviour. The results are presented here, regarding (i) communication delays for some simulations of node churn, (ii) delays measured in test operations over PlanetLab, in direct communication, and (iii) through the I2P anonymizing network.