Related papers: Comparing User Activity on X and Mastodon
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…
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…
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…
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…
Social media have been fundamental in the daily lives of millions of people, but they have raised concerns about content moderation policies, the management of personal data, and their commercial exploitation. The acquisition of Twitter…
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…
A recent surge of users migrating from Twitter to alternative platforms, such as Mastodon, raised questions regarding what migration patterns are, how different platforms impact user behaviors, and how migrated users settle in the migration…
ActivityPub is a decentralized social networking protocol that has gained significant attention from the media for its ability to communicate through the Fediverse, short for the federated web. Servers such as Mastodon implement the…
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…
This paper examines the potential of the Fediverse, a federated network of social media and content platforms, to counter the centralization and dominance of commercial platforms on the social Web. We gather evidence from the technology…
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 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'…
Decentralized Online Social Networks (DOSNs) represent a growing trend in the social media landscape, as opposed to the well-known centralized peers, which are often in the spotlight due to privacy concerns and a vision typically focused on…
Social media platforms have witnessed a dynamic landscape of user migration in recent years, fueled by changes in ownership, policy, and user preferences. This paper explores the phenomenon of user migration from established platforms like…
The acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk has spurred controversy and uncertainty among Twitter users. The move raised as many praises as concerns, particularly regarding Musk's views on free speech. As a result, a large number of Twitter…
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…
As centralized social media platforms face growing concerns, more users are seeking greater control over their social feeds and turning to decentralized alternatives such as Mastodon. The decentralized nature of Mastodon creates unique…
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…
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…
This article addresses the disconnect between the individual policy documents of Mastodon instances--many of which explicitly prohibit data collection for research purposes--and the actual data handling practices observed in academic…