Email social network - architecture draft

by: Artur Dziedziczak

March 12, 2025

Introduction

During my stay in London I came up with an architecture of social network almost fully based on email. [1]

It has many constraints but still I think the flexibility it provides is highly desirable in world of corporate controlled social media

Why not fediverse

Fediverse have quite some issues which prevent many people from joining it:

  • to use it you need to create account on one of the insances. People are stupid by default. They do not understand concept of instances and this prevents a lot of pople from using it.
  • hosting of fediverse services is high. You not only need to have storage but also pay a lot when it comes to network traffic.
  • the diverse server architecture is becoming more and more centralized due to super big instances which control most of the traffic.

My alternative

The architecture is designed into three different parts

  • email service which has global email alias which is accepting any email from outside of the network. Different people can host different email services which makes network decentralized.
  • object storage which stores emails. Different peple which has email services write public emails to those storages. This way we decentralize object storage.
  • presentation layers of object storages. Basically anyone who wants can create any application they want to present publicly stored emails.

Restrictions to ensure safe, reliable and cheep network

  • you cannot add attachements to emails, evey resoure which is not a text should be hosted by third party. You probably have you photos store on Google drive, apple storage or any other place. It’s already there. All you should do is to attach link to these resources in email.
  • there are two emails provided by default on each instance. private@xyz.xyz and public@xyz.xyz. Everything which is sent to private does not push information about sender to presentation layer. Still spam bots are filtered on email client layer. This ensures that you can create anonymous messages which are hosted publicly.
  • whenever you send email public@xyz.xyz your email adress will be visible publicly in presentation layer. This way peole can reply back to your post.
  • this about presentation layer as a RSS feed but global. Kind of like hacker news but email based.
  • Block storages list is always available somewhere onlie. This way federated apps can filter unwanted data.
  • joining different block storages happens on presentation layer. This way you can show data without need to host them and people who do not want to allow your app to prevent data can restrict access.
  • replies happen via CC in the email list. So whenever you reply to a post and you have post ID, OP, and public/private email feed. Whenever you reply new email is pushed to feed.
  • there are no likes or boosts. Only email threads?

Benefits

  • you have network decentralized on 2 levels. First is the level of feeds where admins check data. Second one is the actual email inbox/outbox which is hold by your email. It’s possible for you to communicate privately with others without usage of the network at all.

Challanges

how to solve follow accounts? do we even need them? maybe thematic filters based on tags are enough?

I think for this can be solved by using "contact groups" in your email provider. This way you can easilly filter people you want to be in touch with

how to solve profile accounts/ by default no sign-in is required. How should we display avatars then?

This is can be solved by public profiles from email providers. Also it’s possible that public profile is setup by sending email with photo and details

how to store emails is S3 bucket?

They need to be forwarded by some email deamon plugin which will push them to s3

Use case diagrams

Publish content - without email visible

C4Context
  title System Context diagram for Internet Banking System
    Enterprise_Boundary(b0, "People with email adresses") {
      Person(personA, "Person creator alex@gmail.com", "Person who would like to publish content")
      Person(personB, "Person receiver martha@gmail.com", "Person who would like to receive content")
    }
    Enterprise_Boundary(b1, "Federated service 1") {
      System(serviceEmail1, "Email server private@foo.com", "")
      System(serviceDataStorage1, "Data storage", "")
      System(servicePresentationLayer1, "WebApp/AndroindApp/Etc.", "")
    }
    Enterprise_Boundary(b2, "Federated service 2") {
      System(serviceEmail2, "Email server Email server private@bar.com", "")
      System(serviceDataStorage2, "Data storage", "")
    }
    Enterprise_Boundary(b3, "Consumer presentation layer") {
      System(servicePresentationLayer3, "WebApp/AndroindApp/Etc.", "")
    }
    Rel(personA, serviceEmail1, "Sends email to private@foo.com", "")
    Rel(serviceEmail1, serviceDataStorage1, "Forward to data storage", "Email is forwarded to data storage")
    Rel(servicePresentationLayer1, serviceDataStorage1, "Last 1 min messages fetched from data storages", "")
    Rel(servicePresentationLayer1, serviceDataStorage2, "Last 1 min messages fetched from data storages", "")
    Rel(personB, servicePresentationLayer1, "Visits website", "When martha@gmail.com visits website which agregates federated data storages she can see a message without email. This means she cannot reply to it.")

Publish content - with email visible

C4Context
  title System Context diagram for Internet Banking System
    Enterprise_Boundary(b0, "People with email adresses") {
      Person(personA, "Person creator alex@gmail.com", "Person who would like to publish content")
      Person(personB, "Person receiver martha@gmail.com", "Person who would like to receive content")
    }
    Enterprise_Boundary(b1, "Federated service 1") {
      System(serviceEmail1, "Email server private@foo.com", "")
      System(serviceDataStorage1, "Data storage", "")
      System(servicePresentationLayer1, "WebApp/AndroindApp/Etc.", "")
    }
    Enterprise_Boundary(b2, "Federated service 2") {
      System(serviceEmail2, "Email server Email server private@bar.com", "")
      System(serviceDataStorage2, "Data storage", "")
      System(servicePresentationLayer2, "WebApp/AndroindApp/Etc.", "")
    }
    Enterprise_Boundary(b3, "Consumer presentation layer") {
      System(servicePresentationLayer3, "WebApp/AndroindApp/Etc.", "")
    }
    Rel(personA, serviceEmail1, "Sends email to private@foo.com", "")
    Rel(serviceEmail1, serviceDataStorage1, "Forward to data storage", "Email is forwarded to data storage")
    Rel(servicePresentationLayer1, serviceDataStorage1, "Last 1 min messages fetched from data storages", "")
    Rel(servicePresentationLayer2, serviceDataStorage2, "Last 1 min messages fetched from data storages", "")
    Rel(personB, servicePresentationLayer1, "Visits website", "When martha@gmail.com visits website which agregates federated data storages she can see a message with email. This means she can reply to it via her own email.")

Reply to content - OP

C4Context
  title System Context diagram for Internet Banking System
    Enterprise_Boundary(b0, "People with email adresses") {
      System_Boundary(systemPersonA, "Client of person A") {
        Person(personA, "Person creator", "Person who would like to publish content")
        System(systemEmailA, "alex@gmail.com")
      }
      System_Boundary(systemPersonB, "Client of person B") {
        Person(personB, "Person receiver", "Person who would like to receive content")
        System(systemEmailB, "martha@gmail.com")
      }
    }
    Enterprise_Boundary(b1, "Federated service 1") {
      System(serviceEmail1, "Email server private@foo.com", "")
      System(serviceDataStorage1, "Data storage", "")
      System(servicePresentationLayer1, "WebApp/AndroindApp/Etc.", "")
    }
    Enterprise_Boundary(b2, "Federated service 2") {
      System(serviceEmail2, "Email server Email server private@bar.com", "")
      System(serviceDataStorage2, "Data storage", "")
      System(servicePresentationLayer2, "WebApp/AndroindApp/Etc.", "")
    }
    Enterprise_Boundary(b3, "Consumer presentation layer") {
      System(servicePresentationLayer3, "WebApp/AndroindApp/Etc.", "")
    }
    Rel(personB, servicePresentationLayer1, "1. Visits website", "When martha@gmail.com visits website she clicks 'reply' on one of the contents. Popup of client appears.")
    Rel(servicePresentationLayer1, systemEmailB, "2. Popup email client appears with pre-filled values of 'TO: private@foo.com, alex@gmail.com'. when she sends her reply the message is transported to federated email service.", "")
    Rel(systemEmailB, serviceEmail2, "3.1 Email to federated service", "")
    Rel(servicePresentationLayer2, serviceDataStorage2, "4. Last 1 min messages fetched from data storages", "")
    Rel(systemEmailB, systemEmailA, "3.2 Email also sent to person A inbox", "")

Reply to content - OP + other content

Show all my public content

C4Context
  title System Context diagram for Internet Banking System
    Enterprise_Boundary(b0, "People with email adresses") {
      System_Boundary(systemPersonA, "Client of person A") {
        Person(personA, "Person creator", "Person who would like to publish content")
        System(systemEmailA, "alex@gmail.com")
      }
    }
    Enterprise_Boundary(b1, "Federated service 1") {
      System(serviceEmail1, "Email server private@foo.com", "")
      System(serviceDataStorage1, "Data storage", "")
      System(servicePresentationLayer1, "WebApp/AndroindApp/Etc.", "")
    }
    Enterprise_Boundary(b2, "Federated service 2") {
      System(serviceEmail2, "Email server Email server private@bar.com", "")
      System(serviceDataStorage2, "Data storage", "")
      System(servicePresentationLayer2, "WebApp/AndroindApp/Etc.", "")
    }
    Enterprise_Boundary(b3, "Consumer presentation layer") {
      System(servicePresentationLayer3, "WebApp/AndroindApp/Etc.", "")
    }
    Rel(personA, servicePresentationLayer1, "1. Visits website", "When alex@gmail.com visits website she puts her email into search. Search results show her her messages on different federated servers. This is as simple as filtering by email adress.")
    Rel(servicePresentationLayer1, serviceDataStorage1, "1.1 Fetch data ", "")
    Rel(servicePresentationLayer2, serviceDataStorage1, "1.2 Fetch data", "")

Remove follower

Simply block someones email adress

Remove all data account with email visible

Instance must guarantee "remove all post option" by sending email with consent to remove

Sources [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

[1] “Internet mail.” [Online]. Available: https://cr.yp.to/mail.html

[2] “PostfixQueueParser.” [Online]. Available: https://github.com/andris9/postfix-parser

[3] “ultralight-s3.” [Online]. Available: https://www.npmjs.com/package/ultralight-s3

[4] “MailHog.” [Online]. Available: https://github.com/mailhog/MailHog

[5] “Setting up a mailinator-like test mail server with postfix and MailHog .” [Online]. Available: https://agiletesting.blogspot.com/2016/02/setting-up-mailinator-like-test-mail.html

[6] “Procmail.” [Online]. Available: https://porkmail.org/era/procmail/mini-faq#description

[7] “How to Use MailHog to Test Emails Locally (Step-by-Step Guide) .” [Online]. Available: https://kinsta.com/blog/mailhog/