HELIOS a Decentralized Online Social Network Framework

Social Networking platforms are typically designed around a centralized server architecture. Reasons for this are amongst others, data and platform ownership, reliability, and security. The main drawback is the lack of autonomy for both the user and the online communities the user is involved in. In recent years several Decentralized Online Social Network (DOSN) platforms have been introduced with the goal to facilitate more control over private data. The development and deployment of most DOSN is driven by a strong developer community. This allows for rapid development, however, can lack flexibility in how and where the social network application is used. Moreover, most DOSN are designed for a specific purpose without providing a more generally applicable framework for rapid DOSN based social application development and deployment. The HELIOS framework addresses this issue by introducing central aspects of a DOSN in a modular DOSN principles-based framework. We present the framework, the overall findings and use case examples on how to use and extend the framework.