Supporting the portability of profiles using the blockchain in the Mastodon social network

This Master Thesis has the objective to present a possible solution, using the Blockchain, to solve the fact that Mastodon social network does not support the portability of profiles. Mastodon is one of the most famous DOSN - Decentralized Online Social Network, free, open source, that offers a microblogging service as Twitter. Mastodon supports the interoperability and portability of data across sites, using the ActivityPub open protocol. This allows users connected to one site to follow the users connected to other sites, and to share posts across communities, but if for some reasons, a user decides to migrate to another instance, he/she has to recreate a new account on the new instance with, for example, the unpleasant consequence of loss of followers. Our solution is a prototype based on Hyperledger Fabric, that uses a microservice-like approach. A Server module provides a RESTful API and acts as a gateway between the Mastodon application and the Fabric network, thus the management of certificates and the connection to the network are independent of the Mastodon application. This makes the implementation easier to maintain on the long term. This solution allows the users to register to different instances of Mastodon with the credentials stored on the Blockchain, to perform the Login and other few operations. This works includes also a dissertation about the Decentralization, the Mastodon social network and the Blockchain.