System lets people personalize online social spaces while staying connected with others

Say a local concert venue wants to engage its community by giving social media followers an easy way to share and comment on new music from emerging artists. Rather than working within the constraints of existing social platforms, the venue might want to create its own social app with the functionality that would be best for its community. But building a new social app from scratch involves many complicated programming steps, and even if the venue can create a customized app, the organization’s followers may be unwilling to join the new platform because it could mean leaving their connections and data behind.Now, researchers from MIT have launched a framework called Graffiti that makes building personalized social applications easier, while allowing users to migrate between multiple applications without losing their friends or data.“We want to empower people to have control over their own designs rather than having them dictated from the top down,” says electrical engineering and computer science graduate student Theia Henderson.Henderson and her colleagues designed Graffiti with a flexible structure so individuals have the freedom to create a variety of customized applications, from messenger apps like WhatsApp to microblogging platforms like X to location-based social networking sites like Nextdoor, all using only front-end development tools like HTML.The protocol ensures all applications can interoperate, so content posted on one application can appear on any other application, even those with disparate designs or functionality. Importantly, Graffiti users retain control of their data, which is stored on a decentralized infrastructure rather than being held by a specific application.While the pros and cons of implementing Graffiti at scale remain to be fully explored, the researchers hope this new approach can someday lead to healthier online interactions.“We’ve shown that you can have a rich social ecosystem where everyone owns their own data and can use whatever applications they want to interact with whoever they want in whatever way they want. And they can have their own experiences without losing connection with the people they want to stay connected with,” says David Karger, professor of EECS and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).Henderson, the lead author, and Karger are joined by MIT Research Scientist David D. Clark on a paper about Graffiti, which will be presented at the ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology.Personalized, integrated applicationsWith Graffiti, the researchers had two main goals: to lower the barrier to creating personalized social applications and to enable those personalized applications to interoperate without requiring permission from developers.To make the design process easier, they built a collective back-end infrastructure that all applications access to store and share content. This means developers don’t need to write any complex server code. Instead, designing a Graffiti application is more like making a website using popular tools like Vue.Developers can also easily introduce new features and new types of content, giving them more freedom and fostering creativity.“Graffiti is so straightforward that we used it as the infrastructure for the intro to web design class I teach, and students were able to write the front-end very easily to come up with all sorts of applications,” Karger says.The open, interoperable nature of Graffiti means no one entity has the power to set a moderation policy for the entire platform. Instead, multiple competing and contradictory moderation services can operate, and people can choose the ones they like. Graffiti uses the idea of “total reification,” where every action taken in Graffiti, such as liking, sharing, or blocking a post, is represented and stored as its own piece of data. A user can configure their social application to interpret or ignore those data using its own rules.For instance, if an application is designed so a certain user is a moderator, posts blocked by that user won’t appear in the application. But for an application with different rules where that person isn’t considered a moderator, other users might just see a warning or no flag at all.“Theia’s system lets each person pick their own moderators, avoiding the one-sized-fits-all approach to moderation taken by the major social platforms,” Karger says.But at the same time, having no central moderator means there is no one to remove content from the platform that might be offensive or illegal.“We need to do more research to understand if that is going to provide real, damaging consequences or if the kind of personal moderation we created can provide the protections people need,” he adds.Empowering social media usersThe researchers also had to overcome a problem known as context collapse, which conflicts with their goal of interoperation.For instance, context collapse would occur if a person’s Tinder profile appeared on LinkedIn, or if a post intended for one group, like close friends, would create conflict with another group, such as family members. Context collapse can lead to anxiety and have social repercussions for the user and their different communities.“We realize that interoperability can sometimes be a bad thing. People have boundaries between different social contexts, and we didn’t want to violate those,” Henderson says.To avoid context collapse, the researchers designed Graffiti so all content is organized into distinct channels. Channels are flexible and can represent a variety of contexts, such as people, applications, locations, etc.If a user’s post appears in an application channel but not their personal channel, others using that application will see the post, but those who only follow this user will not.“Individuals should have the power to choose the audience for whatever they want to say,” Karger adds.The researchers created multiple Graffiti applications to showcase personalization and interoperability, including a community-specific application for a local concert venue, a text-centric microblogging platform patterned off X, a Wikipedia-like application that enables collective editing, and a real-time messaging app with multiple moderation schemes patterned off WhatsApp and Slack.“It also leaves room to create so many social applications people haven’t thought of yet. I’m really excited to see what people come up with when they are given full creative freedom,” Henderson says.In the future, she and her colleagues want to explore additional social applications they could build with Graffiti. They also intend to incorporate tools like graphical editors to simplify the design process. In addition, they want to strengthen Graffiti’s security and privacy.And while there is still a long way to go before Graffiti could be implemented at scale, the researchers are currently running a user study as they explore the potential positive and negative impacts the system could have on the social media landscape.