The Current State of Interoperability in Decentralized Online Social Networking Services

Online Social Networks (OSN) are mostly closed, proprietary services that disallow interoperability with other OSN services. In the area of decentralized OSN services, several protocols and services have been proposed that attempt to implement interoperability for distinct aspects of OSN services in heterogeneous federations of OSN services. In this work, we analyze existing protocols and implementations of interoperable OSN services. While existing protocols aim to provide interoperability between OSN services, their scope is limited to certain aspects of OSN functionality, for example dissemination of status updates or creating follower relationships. In practice, OSN services implementing such protocols show a limited support for interoperability, where most functionality cannot be used and accessed between different OSN services. This emphasizes the need for a standard implementing interoperability in the social web.