Related papers: Understanding Decentralized Social Feed Curation o…
The primary purpose of this investigation is to answer the research questions; 1) What are users' motivations for joining Mastodon?; 2) What are users' gratifications for using Mastodon?; and 3) What are the primary reasons that the users…
Personalized recommendation algorithms deliver content to the user on most major social media platforms. While these algorithms are crucial for helping users find relevant content, users lack meaningful control over them. This reduces…
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…
Social media have great potential for enabling public discourse on important societal issues. However, adverse effects, such as polarization and echo chambers, greatly impact the benefits of social media and call for algorithms that…
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…
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…
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.…
Decentralized content curation is the process through which uploaded posts are ranked and filtered based exclusively on users' feedback. Platforms such as the blockchain-based Steemit employ this type of curation while providing monetary…
User interface (UI) personalization can improve usability and user experience. However, current systems offer limited opportunities for customization, and third-party solutions often require significant effort and technical skills beyond…
Decentralized optimization enables multiple devices to learn a global machine learning model while each individual device only has access to its local dataset. By avoiding the need for training data to leave individual users' devices, it…
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…
Ever since social activity on the Internet began migrating from the wilds of the open web to the walled gardens erected by so-called platforms, debates have raged about the responsibilities that these platforms ought to bear. And yet,…
Digital public health monitoring has long relied on data from major social media platforms. Twitter was once an indispensable resource for tracking disease outbreaks and public sentiment in real time. Researchers used Twitter to monitor…
Social media platforms struggle to protect users from harmful content through content moderation. These platforms have recently leveraged machine learning models to cope with the vast amount of user-generated content daily. Since moderation…
Decentralising the Web is a desirable but challenging goal. One particular challenge is achieving decentralised content moderation in the face of various adversaries (e.g. trolls). To overcome this challenge, many Decentralised Web (DW)…
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.…
For a social networking service to acquire and retain users, it must find ways to keep them engaged. By accurately gauging their preferences, it is able to serve them with the subset of available content that maximises revenue for the site.…
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…
Online platforms are seeing increasing amounts of AI-generated content -- text and other forms of media that are made or co-created with generative AI. This trend suggests platforms may need to establish governance frameworks, including…
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…