Related papers: Understanding Decentralized Social Feed Curation o…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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 rapidly adopted algorithmic curation with little consideration for the potential harm to users' mental well-being. We present findings from design workshops with 21 participants diagnosed with mental illness…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Social media feed algorithms infer user preferences from their past behaviors. Yet what drives engagement often diverges from what users value. We examine this gap between stated preferences (what users say they prefer) and revealed…
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…
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…
Social media feeds are deeply personal spaces that reflect individual values and preferences. However, top-down, platform-wide content algorithms can reduce users' sense of agency and fail to account for nuanced experiences and values.…
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…
There has been an explosion of multimodal content generated on social media networks in the last few years, which has necessitated a deeper understanding of social media content and user behavior. We present a novel content-independent…
Social media platforms moderate content for each user by incorporating the outputs of both platform-wide content moderation systems and, in some cases, user-configured personal moderation preferences. However, it is unclear (1) how end…
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'…