Related papers: An evidence-based and critical analysis of the Fed…
As an alternative to Twitter and other centralized social networks, the Fediverse is growing in popularity. The recent, and polemical, takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk has exacerbated this trend. The Fediverse includes a growing number of…
The "Fediverse", a federation of decentralized social media servers, has emerged after a decade in which centralized platforms like X (formerly Twitter) have dominated the landscape. The structure of a federation should affect user…
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…
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…
Traditional social media platforms, once envisioned as digital town squares, now face growing criticism over corporate control, content moderation, and privacy concerns. Events such as Twitter's acquisition (now X) and major policy changes…
Centralized social media platforms are currently experiencing a shift in user engagement, drawing attention to alternative paradigms like Decentralized Online Social Networks (DOSNs). The rising popularity of DOSNs finds its root in the…
The Decentralised Web (DW) has recently seen a renewed momentum, with a number of DW platforms like Mastodon, Peer-Tube, and Hubzilla gaining increasing traction. These offer alternatives to traditional social networks like Twitter,…
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…
Decentralized machine learning - where each client keeps its own data locally and uses its own computational resources to collaboratively train a model by exchanging peer-to-peer messages - is increasingly popular, as it enables better…
Open-source, Decentralized Online Social Networks (DOSNs) are emerging as alternatives to the popular yet centralized and profit-driven platforms like Facebook or Twitter. In DOSNs, users can set up their own server, or instance, while they…
Online communities often overlap and coexist, despite incongruent norms and approaches to content moderation. When communities diverge, decentralized and federated communities may pursue group-level sanctions, including defederation…
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…
Decentralized architecture offers a robust and flexible structure for online platforms, since centralized moderation and computation can be easy to disrupt with targeted attacks. However, a platform offering a decentralized architecture…
Socio-diversity, the variety of human opinions, ideas, behaviors and styles, has profound implications for social systems. While it fuels innovation, productivity, and collective intelligence, it can also complicate communication and erode…
Mainstream social media platforms function as "walled garden" ecosystems that restrict user agency, control, and data portability. They have demonstrated a lack of transparency that contributes to a multitude of online harms. Our research…
Over the past decade, we have witnessed the Internet becoming increasingly centralized in the hands of a small number of giant technology firms, that control many of the most popular applications and the content they host on their…
Social media platforms offer numerous benefits and allow people to come together for various causes. Many communities, academia, government agencies, institutions, healthcare, entertainment, and businesses are on social media platforms.…
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…
The Web is a ubiquitous economic, educational, and collaborative space. However, it also serves as a haven for personal information harvesting. Existing decentralised Web-based ecosystems, such as Solid, aim to combat personal data…
Decentralized social networks like Mastodon and BlueSky are trending topics that have drawn much attention and discussion in recent years. By devolving powers from the central node to the end users, decentralized social networks aim to cure…