Results from a Practical Deployment of the MyZone Decentralized P2P Social Network
It addresses privacy and censorship issues for small, closely-knit online communities, though it appears incremental as it combines existing P2P and centralized architectures.
The paper tackles the challenge of creating a private, censorship-resistant social network for small communities by deploying MyZone, a hybrid P2P system, which achieved a 40-day deployment with over 100 users while minimizing costs and ensuring data ownership.
This paper presents MyZone, a private online social network for relatively small, closely-knit communities. MyZone has three important distinguishing features. First, users keep the ownership of their data and have complete control over maintaining their privacy. Second, MyZone is free from any possibility of content censorship and is highly resilient to any single point of disconnection. Finally, MyZone minimizes deployment cost by minimizing its computation, storage and network bandwidth requirements. It incorporates both a P2P architecture and a centralized architecture in its design ensuring high availability, security and privacy. A prototype of MyZone was deployed over a period of 40 days with a membership of more than one hundred users. The paper provides a detailed evaluation of the results obtained from this deployment.