Upcoming social networks shall be decentralized, secure and with controlled quality. By this, future communication platforms will be flexibly applicable, robust against attacks from inside as well as from powerful institutions, as well as these platforms will be user friendly, thus ideal collaboration tools.

In order to reach this goal of a decentralized and secure social network, we address the challenges from three different directions:

(1) Peer-to-peer based architectures, data structures and mechanisms for social networks are researched and evaluated, which enable a broad application scope of the peer-to-peer research.

(2) Mechanisms for maintaining, monitoring and controlling the quality of service of a decentralized social network are necessary in order to satisfy the needs of the users of such a decentralized social network.

(3) Security challenges in decentralized social networks both using peer-to-peer technology as well as wireless mesh networks will be investigated and appropriate solutions will be researched.

We consider the combination of these three domains (peer-to-peer technology, quality of service and security) of high relevance, especially for highly influencing topics for our society: social networking for private entertainment, for collaboration in commercial context as well as using social communication platforms in small and liberal (political) organizations.