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Distributed and Self-organizing Systems
Distributed and Self-organizing Systems

PUBLICATION

TrADS: A Trust-Aware Decentralized Social Network

Type

Journal Article

Year

2025

Authors

siegert

dlei

Alejandro Wurts Santos

Alejandro Wurts Santos

gaedke

Research Area

Web Engineering

Published in

Journal of Web Engineering

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Abstract

In today's data-driven world, people are increasingly prioritising data privacy and control. This awareness has sparked an initiative for a decentralized web, where web applications no longer rely on centralized data storage. Solid, a prominent approach for a decentralized web, allows users to store their data in decentralized pods of their control. However, the integration of data from various and potentially untrusted sources can lead to malicious or harmful results and impair user experience. To solve this problem for social networks, we propose a trust-aware and decentralized web application called TrADS. It utilises the MVC pattern to integrate external data from Solid pods based on trust evaluations. In this article, we extend our first paper on TrADS with further details on related work assessment, concept and implementation. We are also extending our evaluation to a second international user study with another 64 participants. We measure the user experience instead of pure usability and form two separate groups of participants, one of which experiences the trust awareness of TrADS and one of which does not. The results do not yet show significant improvement in the user experience but show that after using trust awareness in a social network, users favour a network with such features.

Reference

Siegert, Valentin; Leichsenring, Dirk; Santos, Alejandro W.; Gaedke, Martin: TrADS: A Trust-Aware Decentralized Social Network. Journal of Web Engineering, pp. 529-562, 2025.



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