Revisiting Content Availability in Distributed Online Social Networks

Online Social Networks (OSN) are among the most popular applications in today’s Internet. Decentralized online social networks (DOSNs), a special class of OSNs, promise better privacy and autonomy than traditional centralized OSNs. However, ensuring availability of content when the content owner is not online remains a major challenge. In this paper, we rely on the structure of the social graphs underlying DOSN for replication. In particular, we propose that friends, who are anyhow interested in the content, are used to replicate the users content. We study the availability of such natural replication schemes via both theoretical analysis as well as simulations based on data from OSN users. We find that the availability of the content increases drastically when compared to the online time of the user, e. g., by a factor of more than 2 for 90% of the users. Thus, with these simple schemes we provide a baseline for any more complicated content replication scheme.