Related papers: Challenges in the Decentralised Web: The Mastodon …
The tremendous success of major Online Social Networks (OSNs) platforms has raised increasing concerns about negative phenomena, such as mass control, fake news, and echo chambers. In addition, the increasingly strict control over users'…
To foster an active and engaged community, social networks employ recommendation algorithms that filter large amounts of contents and provide a user with personalized views of the network. Popular social networks such as Facebook and…
Since the first appearance of the World Wide Web, people more rely on the Web for their cyber social activities. The second phase of World Wide Web, named Web 2.0, has been extensively attracting worldwide people that participate in…
Decentralized Web, or DWeb, is envisioned as a promising future of the Web. Being decentralized, there are no dedicated web servers in DWeb; Devices that retrieve web contents also serve their cached data to peer devices with straight…
Since the dawn of human civilization, trust has been the core challenge of social organization. Trust functions to reduce the effort spent in constantly monitoring others' actions in order to verify their assertions, thus facilitating…
Decentralized social media protocols enable users in independent, user-hosted servers (i.e., instances) to interact with each other while they self-govern. This community-based model of social media governance opens up new opportunities for…
The web of today whether you prefer to call it web 2.0, web 3.0, web 5.0 or even the metaverse is at a critical stage of evolution and challenge, largely centered around its crisis of identity. Like teenagers who cannot assess properly…
Community-level blocklists are key to content moderation practices in decentralized social media. These blocklists enable moderators to prevent other communities, such as those acting in bad faith, from interacting with their own -- and, if…
Social media is inherently about connecting and interacting with others. Different social media platforms have unique characteristics and user bases. Moreover, people use different platforms for various social and entertainment purposes.…
The pitfalls of centralized social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter/X, have led to concerns about control, transparency, and accountability. Decentralized social networks have emerged as a result with the goal of empowering users.…
The overreaches of mainstream social media platforms have been extensively reported and studied. For activist communities, these platforms pose risks of surveillance, censorship, or erasure. Decentralized social networks (DSNs) serve as…
Recent years have witnessed growing consolidation of web operations. For example, the majority of web traffic now originates from a few organizations, and even micro-websites often choose to host on large pre-existing cloud infrastructures.…
We are at the beginning of a shift in how content is created and exchanged over the web. While content was previously created primarily by a small set of entities, today, individual users -- empowered by devices like digital cameras and…
The Fediverse, a group of interconnected servers providing a variety of interoperable services (e.g. micro-blogging in Mastodon) has gained rapid popularity. This sudden growth, partly driven by Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, has…
The old mantra of decentralizing the Internet is coming again with fanfare, this time around the blockchain technology hype. We have already seen a technology supposed to change the nature of the Internet: peer-to-peer. The reality is that…
A movement for a more transparent and decentralized Internet is globally attracting more attention. People are becoming more privacy-aware of their online identities and data. The Internet is constantly evolving. Web2 focused on companies…
The decentralized architecture of Internet sparkled techno-utopian visions of a virtual freedom space for humanity. Peer-to-peer systems, collaborative creation (wikipedia), open source software (Linux), universal shared knowledge, and the…
Environments for decentralized on-line collaboration are now widespread on the Web, underpinning open-source efforts, knowledge creation sites including Wikipedia, and other experiments in joint production. When a distributed group works…
A debate in the research community has buzzed in the background for years: should large-scale Internet services be centralized or decentralized? Now-common centralized cloud and web services have downsides -- user lock-in and loss of…
Following changes in Twitter's ownership in 2022 and subsequent changes to content moderation policies, many in academia looked to move their discourse elsewhere and migration to Mastodon was pursued by some. Our study examines the behavior…