TrADS: A Trust-Aware Decentralized Social Network

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 trustaware 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.