# Systematic Evaluation of LibreSocial--A Peer-To-Peer Framework for Online Social Networks
## 1 Introduction  
Social networking has experienced tremendous growth since the turn of the 21 st century, a fact demonstrated by number of online social networks (OSNs) available, with studies showing a general overlap between the online and offline networks of many of these users [1]. As a consequence of the growth of these platforms some concerns have arisen on two fronts, technical and social [2]. The technical concerns arose due to a high dependence on centralization in administering the OSNs, and with a rapidly growing user base, various scalability performance issues and hence increasing cost of management and maintenance of the overall system infrastructure have emerged. As it currently stands, the OSN providers have succeeded in developing mitigating solutions for the scalability concerns, such as using distributed data management solutions such as Cassandra [3] and Haystack [4] in Facebook or using cloud services such as Amazon's AWS storage services ([[https://aws.amazon.com/products/storage/](https://aws.amazon.com/products/storage/)]([https://aws.amazon.com/products/storage/](https://aws.amazon.com/products/storage/))), with the more popular OSNs with very large user networks, such as Facebook (2.6 billion), YouTube (2 billion) and WhatsApp (2 billion) as of July 2020 ([[https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/)]([https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/))). However, this level of scaling does not come cheap, and more often that not requires the providers to develop monetization models for revenue generation which result in certain violations of the user's rights leading into the second concern. The social concerns have to do with the users' privacy and dataownership. As the centralized OSNs have grown, the providers, who own all the uploaded data, have developed personal data markets [5], in which the user's private data are the product on sale. Although self disclosure is a hallmark of activities over the Internet, the nature of OSNs has increased the level of online disclosure as users exchange data and reveal information about themselves [6]. The collected user data may be sold to third parties who use it for personalized advertising [7], increasing brand awareness [8], emotional manipulation [9] or even online activity surveillance [10]. Even though most of the OSNs include privacy settings to give users some control over how much information they reveal about themselves, in many cases more is revealed when aggressively using these privacy settings than when having fewer setting [11]. To tackle these concerns, a move from centrally managed solutions to decentralized solutions was proposed in two main directions: web-based and P2P-based solutions [12]. _Web-based solutions_, also commonly referred to as federated solutions, are formed by having nodes that run software which supports one of the federated social web protocols which allow the nodes to communicate with one another. Some federated networks have a fairly large user base such as Mastodon (2.7 million), Diaspora (0.77 million), Prosody (0.23 million), although they are not as popular and widespread as the centralized OSNs. However, they have a heavy reliance on a distributed web server infrastructure which requires some in-depth knowledge of web-server administration to setup the OSN hence not many users can effectively use them. In addition, running a private web server for thousands of users also reintroduces the pressure of monetization. On the other hand, _P2P-based solutions_ are easy to set up, requiring only downloading, possible installation and running of the application to join the P2P OSN community. They are therefore suitable to regular Internet users.