Graffiti: Enabling an Ecosystem of Personalized and Interoperable Social Applications

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Henderson, Theia, Karger, David R., Clark, David D.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Henderson, Theia
Karger, David R.
Clark, David D.
author_facet Henderson, Theia
Karger, David R.
Clark, David D.
contents Most social applications, from Twitter to Wikipedia, have rigid one-size-fits-all designs, but building new social applications is both technically challenging and results in applications that are siloed away from existing communities. We present Graffiti, a system that can be used to build a wide variety of personalized social applications with relative ease that also interoperate with each other. People can freely move between a plurality of designs -- each with its own aesthetic, feature set, and moderation -- all without losing their friends or data. Our concept of total reification makes it possible for seemingly contradictory designs, including conflicting moderation rules, to interoperate. Conversely, our concept of channels prevents interoperation from occurring by accident, avoiding context collapse. Graffiti applications interact through a minimal client-side API, which we show admits at least two decentralized implementations. Above the API, we built a Vue plugin, which we use to develop applications similar to Twitter, Messenger, and Wikipedia using only client-side code. Our case studies explore how these and other novel applications interoperate, as well as the broader ecosystem that Graffiti enables.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_04889
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Graffiti: Enabling an Ecosystem of Personalized and Interoperable Social Applications
Henderson, Theia
Karger, David R.
Clark, David D.
Social and Information Networks
Human-Computer Interaction
Software Engineering
Most social applications, from Twitter to Wikipedia, have rigid one-size-fits-all designs, but building new social applications is both technically challenging and results in applications that are siloed away from existing communities. We present Graffiti, a system that can be used to build a wide variety of personalized social applications with relative ease that also interoperate with each other. People can freely move between a plurality of designs -- each with its own aesthetic, feature set, and moderation -- all without losing their friends or data. Our concept of total reification makes it possible for seemingly contradictory designs, including conflicting moderation rules, to interoperate. Conversely, our concept of channels prevents interoperation from occurring by accident, avoiding context collapse. Graffiti applications interact through a minimal client-side API, which we show admits at least two decentralized implementations. Above the API, we built a Vue plugin, which we use to develop applications similar to Twitter, Messenger, and Wikipedia using only client-side code. Our case studies explore how these and other novel applications interoperate, as well as the broader ecosystem that Graffiti enables.
title Graffiti: Enabling an Ecosystem of Personalized and Interoperable Social Applications
topic Social and Information Networks
Human-Computer Interaction
Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04889