Constellation: Programming decentralised social networks

Anne-Marie Kermarrec (1) , François Taïani (1, 2)

1 ASAP - As Scalable As Possible: foundations of large scale dynamic distributed systems
2 Computing Department [Lancaster]

The growing limitations of traditional social networks have prompted work on novel and fully decentralised alternatives to implement on-line social applications. To realise these decentralised social networks, gossip protocols appear as a natural solution, as they intrinsically tend to be highly resilient, efficient, and scalable. Existing gossip-based social networks have however so far been limited to simple use-cases, that typically take a uniform view of users, peers, and the data they hold. To progress to full-fledged decentralised social networks, we posit in this paper that we now need to move to gossip-based social applications that can simultaneously cater for different types of data and services. To help in this task, this paper sketches the main ingredients of a new programming language, Constellation, that seeks to simplify the realisation and experimentation with modular social gossip-based applications.

Mots clés: social networks; gossip-based protocols; distributed systems; domain specific languages; clustering; virtualisation; peer-to-peer

Domaines: Calcul parallèle, distribué et partagé [cs.DC]

Anne-Marie Kermarrec, François Taïani. Constellation: Programming decentralised social networks. 2011. ⟨hal-00646730v2⟩