Social Overlays Meet the Cloud: A Hybrid Architecture for Profile Dissemination in Decentralized Social Networks

Decentralized online social networks (OSNs) have attracted the attention of researchers and practitioners as a viable alternative to the current centralized OSNs, whose business model is based on the exploitation of the private data of their users. Yet, pure decentralized models may either require significant investment on the user side in terms of hardware and bandwidth, or may fail to provide the desired user experience. In this paper, we propose a middle-ground solution that mainly relies on a serverless social overlay in which links represent friendship relations, but occasionally complements it with inexpensive storage rented from the cloud. The experimental evaluation based on a real OSN dataset confirms that our solution provides the desired quality of service at a low cost.