Visions

Please put your vision in a few sentences below of what a distributed social network has to look like in your opinion.

Christian "mrtopf" Scholz

My idea of a distributed social network is to have the social graph "freed" from the service. It should reside on any server of your own choosing. All contact requests are then handled by this server while pertaining the privacy settings you want. Data can be distributed among various services which then can subscribe to other data sets of you like your profile or your social graph (if the contacts allow this). There is some sort of catalogue of where all your data is stored which is updated whenever you join or leave a new system. Although other services store data for you you still control that data, can change it, move it elsewhere or delete it. Further more each content endpoint has one explicit identifier which is used to annotate (e.g. with comments) or aggregate it.

Alexander Korth (twitter)

I envision a solution which I call the Web of Identities. In it, a interconnected web of Identity Providers (IDP) take care of their customer's data. An IDP hosts the user's data, e.g.

  • identity
  • personae
    • profile data
    • social graph,
    • groups, lists
    • live-stream, instant messaging and other live data, messages
    • files, assets
    • reviews, comments, ratings, feedbacks
    • presence information, e.g. location, mood

and provides all needed management, privacy, access control, security, trust, AAA (Authorization, Authentication, and Accounting) etc. features. Given the permission of the user, 3rd party services (3PS), e.g. an SNS, can read and write needed fragments of this data. The user is in full control of his data being hosted and exposed. In this scenario, 3PS's utilize the elements of the IDPs data-base they are allowed to access on behalf of the users who want to use this 3PS. The user profile, the social graph etc. are synchronized with the IDP. The 3PS only implements the delta of data and functionality not being provided by the IHs. Each user of a particular 3PS can have her identitity hosted by a different IDP, while still interacting within the 3PS.

The Web of Identities should follow basic principles of the World Wide Web (see Berners-Lee, 99), e.g. simplicity, tolerance, modular design and decentralization.

It is essential that IHs emerging from both sides, bottom-up, e.g. a solution developed from scratch, and top-down, e.g. the players like Google or Facebook opening up more and more, can converge in an interoperable Web of Identities, i.e. IDPs, speaking the same language. Like this every user can decide which IDP to trust and to choose as his personal IDP.