Graffiti: Enabling an Ecosystem of Personalized and Interoperable Social Applications

TL;DR

Graffiti is a system that enables the creation of personalized, interoperable social applications with diverse designs and moderation, allowing seamless user movement and interaction across different social ecosystems.

Contribution

It introduces total reification and channels concepts to support interoperable yet distinct social applications with minimal client-side API and a Vue plugin.

Findings

Supports diverse social application designs

Enables seamless user and data migration between applications

Demonstrates interoperability through case studies

Abstract

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.