SoChainDB: A Database for Storing and Retrieving Blockchain-Powered Social Network Data

Social networks have become an inseparable part of human activities. Most existing social networks follow a centralized system model, which despite storing valuable information of users, arise many critical concerns such as content ownership and over-commercialization. Recently, decentralized social networks, built primarily on blockchain technology, have been proposed as a substitution to eliminate these concerns. Since decentralized architectures are mature enough to be on par with the centralized ones, decentralized social networks are becoming more and more popular. Decentralized social networks can offer both common options like writing posts and comments and more advanced options such as reward systems and voting mechanisms. They provide rich eco-systems for the influencers to interact with their followers and other users via staking systems based on cryptocurrency tokens. The vast and valuable data of the decentralized social networks open several new directions for the research community to extend human behavior knowledge. However, accessing and collecting data from these social networks is not easy because it requires strong blockchain knowledge, which is not the main focus of computer science and social science researchers. Hence, our work proposes the SoChainDB framework that facilitates obtaining data from these new social networks. To show the capacity and strength of SoChainDB, we crawl and publish Hive data - one of the largest blockchain-based social networks. We conduct extensive analyses to understand the insight of Hive data and discuss some interesting applications, e.g., game, non-fungible tokens market built upon Hive. It is worth mentioning that our framework is well-adaptable to other blockchain social networks with minimal modification. SoChainDB is publicly accessible at http://sochaindb.com and the dataset is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.