SONIC: Towards seamless interaction in heterogeneous distributed OSN ecosystems

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become an important part of our everyday online lives. We communicate, share content, and organize meetings and events using OSN platforms. However, even though there is a strong trend towards OSN services to become the main communication medium, most OSN platforms are still proprietary, closed services that keep users from connecting directly and seamlessly to the services of other OSN platforms. The resulting lock-in effects are intentionally created by OSN operators, as their business models are built mostly on targeted advertisement services. We envision a truly open and decentralized ecosystem of OSN platforms, where users are not cut off from friends using other social platforms and can freely migrate from one OSN platform to another at any time without losing established relationships in the social graph. This would allow users to freely choose an OSN platform of their liking instead of being limited in their choice to the platform used by one´s friends. In this paper, we give an overview about the issues addressed within the research project SONIC and present the architectural requirements as well as the architectural concepts of the proposed solution. The project proposes an decentralized and heterogeneous federation of OSN platforms connected via a communication protocol that allows different OSN platforms to seamlessly communicate with each other and gives users the ability to migrate social profiles between platforms on demand.