# Grassroots Social Networking: Where People have Agency over their Personal Information and Social Graph

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.13941 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13941/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jun 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Implementing Grassroots Logic Programs with Multiagent Transition Systems and AI (Full Version)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06934/) (2026)
- [Volition Elicitation: Operational Semantics for People and Their Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14138/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Offering an architecture for social networking in which people have agency over their personal information and social graph is an open challenge. Here we present a grassroots architecture for serverless, permissionless, peer-to-peer social networks termed Grassroots Social Networking that aims to address this challenge. The architecture is geared for people with networked smartphones -- roaming (address-changing) computing devices communicating over an unreliable network (e.g., using UDP). The architecture incorporates (i) a decentralized social graph, where each person controls, maintains and stores only their local neighborhood in the graph; (iii) personal feeds, with authors and followers who create and store the feeds; and (ii) a grassroots dissemination protocol, in which communication among people occurs only along the edges of their social graph. The architecture realizes these components using the blocklace data structure -- a partially-ordered conflict-free counterpart of the totally-ordered conflict-based blockchain. We provide two example Grassroots Social Networking protocols -- Twitter-like and WhatsApp-like -- and address their security (safety, liveness and privacy), spam/bot/deep-fake resistance, and implementation, demonstrating how server-based social networks could be supplanted by a grassroots architecture.