Related papers: Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized …
Decentralized online social networks have evolved from experimental stages to operating at unprecedented scale, with broader adoption and more active use than ever before. Platforms like Mastodon, Bluesky, Hive, and Nostr have seen notable…
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…
Centralized social networks have experienced a transformative impact on our digital era communication, connection, and information-sharing information. However, it has also raised significant concerns regarding users' privacy and individual…
Traditionally, Bluetooth has been deemed unsuitable for sustaining a large-scale multi-hop network. There are two main reasons: severe frequency channel collisions under a large-scale network and high complexity of designing an efficient…
Social media feeds use predictive models to maximize engagement, often misaligning how people consume content with how they wish to. We introduce Bonsai, a system that enables people to build personalized and intentional feeds. Bonsai…
Social media platforms mediate professional communication, political expression, and community formation, making the rare instances when users collectively abandon an incumbent platform particularly consequential. Strong network effects…
Middleware, third-party software intermediaries between users and platforms, has been broached as a means to decentralize the power of social media platforms and enhance user agency. Middleware may enable a more user-centric and democratic…
Understanding and predicting user behavior on social media platforms is crucial for content recommendation and platform design. While existing approaches focus primarily on common actions like retweeting and liking, the prediction of rare…
Large language models (LLMs) offer promising capabilities for simulating social media dynamics at scale, enabling studies that would be ethically or logistically challenging with human subjects. However, the field lacks standardized data…
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 emergence of blockchain technology has fostered the development of numerous decentralized applications (dapps) in recent years Pub/sub (publish/subscribe) systems play a crucial role by associating messages with specific topics and…
As internet access expands, so does exposure to harmful content, increasing the need for effective moderation. Research has demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) can be effectively utilized for social media moderation tasks,…
Blockchain technologies have been boosting the development of data-driven decentralized services in a wide range of fields. However, with the spirit of full transparency, many public blockchains expose all types of data to the public such…
Stance detection identifies the viewpoint expressed in text toward a specific target, such as a political figure. While previous datasets have focused primarily on tweet-level stances from established platforms, user-level stance resources,…
Decentralized algorithm is a form of computation that achieves a global goal through local dynamics that relies on low-cost communication between directly-connected agents. On large-scale optimization tasks involving distributed datasets,…
The proliferation of emerging applications, such as autonomous driving and immersive experiences, demands cellular networks that are not only faster, but fundamentally more resilient and autonomous. This paper presents a BlueSky vision on…
Discord has evolved from a gaming-focused communication tool into a versatile platform supporting diverse online communities. Despite its large user base and active public servers, academic research on Discord remains limited due to data…
Blockchain technology, which was introduced for supporting cryptocurrencies, today provides a decentralized infrastructure for general information storage and execution of algorithms, thus enabling the conversion of many applications and…
On-chain crowdsourcing leverages blockchain's decentralization, transparency, and tamper-resistance to build trustworthy and verifiable Web3 crowdsourced services. However, existing decentralized reputation frameworks do not reconcile…
Web 3.0 focuses on the decentralization of the internet and creating a system of interconnected and independent computers for improved privacy and security. We extend the idea of the decentralization of the web to the social media space:…