Social Personal Data Stores: the Nuclei of Decentralised Social Machines

Personal Data Stores are among the many efforts that are currently underway to try to re-decentralise the Web, and to bring more control and data management and storage capability under the control of the user. Few of these architectures, however, have considered the needs of supporting decentralised social software from the user’s perspective. In this short paper, we present the results of our design exercise, focusing on two key design needs for building decentralised social machines: that of supporting heterogeneous social apps and multiple, separable user identities. We then present the technical design of a prototype social machine platform, INDX, which realises both of these requirements, and a prototype heterogeneous microblogging application which demonstrates its capabilities.