In this chapter, these questions will be examined taking into account the constitution and development of the ‘Fediverse’ – more than a social network, a network of networks – focusing on a digital community that has been at the centre of the authors’ digital ethnographical work since 2018. This case study will be analysed through different standing points and dichotomic tensions: infrastructure (de-centralisation/distribution), design (mutual conditioning/mutual aid), governance (heteronomy/autonomy).
DA - 2022/11/01/ PY - 2022 DP - www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk LA - en PB - University of Westminster Press ST - Emerging Forms of Sociotechnical Organisation UR - https://www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk/site/chapters/e/10.16997/book54.m/ Y2 - 2024/01/10/11:28:37 L1 - https://www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk/site/chapters/10.16997/book54.m/download/5846/ L2 - https://www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk/site/chapters/e/10.16997/book54.m/ ER - TY - JOUR TI - Fediverse’s evolution from the Cultural-Historical Activity Theory | Fast Capitalism AU - Meza-Cano, José Manuel AU - González-Santiago, Edith AB - This paper begins by mentioning some problems we found in social networks belonging to corporations such as Facebook and Twitter, emphasizing the inclusion of algorithmic timelines, the verticality of decisions that respond to market logic, and the privacy of users’ data. This research gives rise to presenting open-source social networks as a democratic and safer alternative for their users. These social networks shape the Fediverse, the result of the union of the words Federation- Universe, and whose history and evolution we describe. We expose the main postulates of the Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) for using this theory to conduct the Fediverse analysis, characterizing it as an Activity System, and thus, investigating the foremost tensions, reasons for change, and results. Among the findings of this analysis are: the preference of users for specific interfaces, the shift in the choice of social networks by users, the suggestions and opinions of the user community, and their influence on the programming development of social networks, promotion, or abandonment of projects by developers and change in the protocols used to connect the networks. We conclude this work by emphasizing that the CHAT allows this type of systemic analysis to be carried out from the critical moments and historical milestones of a system in constant change, such as the Fediverse. Furthermore, the proposal is made that universities are those institutions with prestige and infrastructure that can promote research, criticism, and reflection on the use of social networks for the benefit of users of the social Internet. Keywords: activity system; psychology; social networks; technological mediation. DA - 2023/// PY - 2023 DP - fastcapitalism.journal.library.uta.edu LA - en-US UR - https://fastcapitalism.journal.library.uta.edu/index.php/fastcapitalism/article/view/481 Y2 - 2024/01/10/11:28:58 L1 - https://fastcapitalism.journal.library.uta.edu/index.php/fastcapitalism/article/download/481/547 ER - TY - CONF TI - The Footprints of a “Mastodon”: How a Decentralized Architecture Influences Online Social Relationships AU - Zignani, Matteo AU - Quadri, Christian AU - Gaito, Sabrina AU - Cherifi, Hocine AU - Rossi, Gian Paolo T2 - IEEE INFOCOM 2019 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS) AB - Decentralized online social networks (DOSNs) have recently emerged as a viable solution to preserve the users' privacy and ensure higher users' control over the contents they publish. However, little is known about the backlashes that the decentralized organization and management of these platforms may have on the overlaid social network. This paper fills the gap. Specifically, we investigate how a decentralized architecture based on distributed servers impacts the structure of the users' neighborhood and their ego-networks. Our analysis relies on social data gathered from the decentralized micro-blogging platform Mastodon, the newest and fastest-growing decentralized alternative to Twitter. Our findings highlight that the social network supported by each server, namely instance, has a specific footprint in terms of degree distribution and clustered structure of the ego-networks of its members. Further, how users connect to people hosted in other instances is heavily bound by the server they are in. Moreover, users who tend to establish relationships in outer instances prefer to use a bunch of servers. Finally, we show that the ego-networks of the users are more clustered within the instance boundary, i.e. triangles are more likely to form among members of the same instance. All these findings suggest that the decentralization drives the social network to a structure that can be potentially very different from the usual one typical of centralized online social networks. Thus, the architecture of a DOSN is a factor developers and researchers should take into account when designing this kind of social platforms. C3 - IEEE INFOCOM 2019 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Workshops (INFOCOM WKSHPS) DA - 2019/04// PY - 2019 DO - 10.1109/INFCOMW.2019.8845221 DP - IEEE Xplore SP - 472 EP - 477 ST - The Footprints of a “Mastodon” UR - https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8845221 Y2 - 2024/01/10/11:29:08 L1 - https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stampPDF/getPDF.jsp?tp=&arnumber=8845221&ref=aHR0cHM6Ly9pZWVleHBsb3JlLmllZWUub3JnL2RvY3VtZW50Lzg4NDUyMjE= L2 - https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8845221 ER - TY - JOUR TI - Drivers of social influence in the Twitter migration to Mastodon AU - Cava, Lucio La AU - Aiello, Luca Maria AU - Tagarelli, Andrea T2 - Scientific Reports AB - The migration of Twitter users to Mastodon following Elon Musk’s acquisition presents a unique opportunity to study collective behavior and gain insights into the drivers of coordinated behavior in online media. We analyzed the social network and the public conversations of about 75,000 migrated users and observed that the temporal trace of their migrations is compatible with a phenomenon of social influence, as described by a compartmental epidemic model of information diffusion. Drawing from prior research on behavioral change, we delved into the factors that account for variations of the effectiveness of the influence process across different Twitter communities. Communities in which the influence process unfolded more rapidly exhibit lower density of social connections, higher levels of signaled commitment to migrating, and more emphasis on shared identity and exchange of factual knowledge in the community discussion. These factors account collectively for 57% of the variance in the observed data. Our results highlight the joint importance of network structure, commitment, and psycho-linguistic aspects of social interactions in characterizing grassroots collective action, and contribute to deepen our understanding of the mechanisms that drive processes of behavior change of online groups. DA - 2023/12/07/ PY - 2023 DO - 10.1038/s41598-023-48200-7 DP - www.nature.com VL - 13 IS - 1 SP - 21626 J2 - Sci Rep LA - en SN - 2045-2322 UR - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-48200-7 Y2 - 2024/01/10/11:43:21 L1 - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-48200-7.pdf KW - Information technology KW - Computer science ER - TY - CONF TI - More of the Same? A Study of Images Shared on Mastodon’s Federated Timeline AU - Nobre, Gabriel P. AU - Ferreira, Carlos H. G. AU - Almeida, Jussara M. A2 - Hopfgartner, Frank A2 - Jaidka, Kokil A2 - Mayr, Philipp A2 - Jose, Joemon A2 - Breitsohl, Jan T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science AB - We offer a first analysis of image content sharing on the Mastodon platform, one of the currently most popular decentralized online social networks. Our study relies on a dataset of toots gathered from a federated timeline (hosted in mastodon.social), consisting of over 1 million images shared by more than 100 thousand users. We focus on two key aspects: (i) profiling image content in terms of presence of explicit content (e.g., violence) and (ii) exploring potential channels between Mastodon instances as well as between Mastodon and the rest of the Web. Our main results offer evidence of a large amount of explicit content shared in the environment as well as the frequent presence of such content on the Web. In addition, we estimate a consistent flow of images (including explicit content) from other Web platforms (e.g., Twitter, Reddit, Facebook) to Mastodon. Finally, we also observed several image co-sharing user communities, ultimately bridging instance boundaries. C1 - Cham C3 - Social Informatics DA - 2022/// PY - 2022 DO - 10.1007/978-3-031-19097-1_11 DP - Springer Link SP - 181 EP - 195 LA - en PB - Springer International Publishing SN - 978-3-031-19097-1 ST - More of the Same? L1 - https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-031-19097-1_11.pdf KW - Mastodon KW - Decentralized online social networks KW - Images KW - Information dissemination ER - TY - GEN TI - Can This Platform Survive? Governance Challenges for the Fediverse AU - Struett, Thomas AU - Sinnreich, Aram AU - Aufderheide, Patricia AU - Gehl, Rob AB - In the wake of recent high-profile crises at commercial social media platforms such as Twitter and Reddit, the “fediverse” has gained both adoption and visibility as a viable non-commercial alternative for individuals, communities, and institutions to develop channels of public communication, dialogue, and debate. In this paper, we draw upon illustrative examples from the history of digital civic discourse, and identify six ways in which history shows us how the potential benefits of the fediverse are at risk of being subverted. We will discuss several specific potential threats to these spaces of civil discourse, including: challenges inherent to distributed governance, commercial platform capture, inclusive access, moderation at scale, reputational assaults by commercial competitors, and the tacitly neoliberal techno-Romanticism familiar from previous digital innovations. These threats must be addressed collectively and proactively by key fediverse stakeholders, in an ecology whose ruling values are non-commercialism, decentralization, open source, free association, and wariness of traditional governance. CY - Rochester, NY DA - 2023/10/10/ PY - 2023 DO - 10.2139/ssrn.4598303 DP - Social Science Research Network LA - en ST - Can This Platform Survive? UR - https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=4598303 Y2 - 2024/01/10/12:06:26 KW - mastodon KW - platform governance KW - social media KW - alternative social media KW - federated social media ER - TY - GEN TI - Section 230 and the Fediverse: Instances of Mastodon's Immunity and Liability AU - Ahooja, Raghav AB - “Code is law,” scholar Lawrence Lessig famously propounded. Technological architecture defines how speech is expressed. Different social media platforms shape discourse differently by virtue of their designs. Be it by allowing users to send ‘Friend requests’ on Facebook, by fixing the character count of Tweets on Twitter, or by prescribing the maximum duration of a TikTok video - such apps shape speech, its limits, its transgressions, and its parlance. Since this space is ever-evolving, platforms with newer technological architecture continue to disrupt the expression of speech, and the newest kid on the block is Mastodon - a decentralized platform on the Fediverse - that provides its users the ability to manage and moderate their own servers (called ‘instances’) on which third-party content can be hosted. Mastodon by virtually allowing anyone to operate their own Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube equivalent empowers its users in new ways. Yet, with great power comes great responsibility. Such an innovation raises a whole set of questions about Mastodon’s liability and immunity at various levels, especially in relation to laws such as FOSTA/SESTA. In this paper, I discuss the potential answers to these questions. CY - Rochester, NY DA - 2023/04/17/ PY - 2023 DO - 10.2139/ssrn.4421665 DP - Social Science Research Network LA - en ST - Section 230 and the Fediverse UR - https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=4421665 Y2 - 2024/01/10/12:07:39 KW - policy KW - platform governance KW - social media KW - Mastodon KW - content moderation KW - Fediverse KW - Section 230 KW - Communications Decency Act KW - decentralized KW - FOSTA/SESTA KW - immunity KW - law KW - liability KW - sex trafficking ER - TY - NEWS TI - Should I join Mastodon? A scientists’ guide to Twitter’s rival AU - Stokel-Walker, Chris T2 - Nature AB - The open-source platform has added nearly half a million users in little more than a week — but should scientists make the leap? We examine the pros and cons. DA - 2022/11/10/ PY - 2022 DP - www.nature.com LA - en ST - Should I join Mastodon? UR - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03668-7 Y2 - 2024/01/10/12:09:07 L2 - https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03668-7 KW - Technology KW - Scientific community KW - Society KW - Software ER - TY - JOUR TI - Toxicology Rounds: Is Mastodon the New Twitter for EM? AU - Gussow, Leon T2 - Emergency Medicine News AB - An abstract is unavailable. DA - 2023/02// PY - 2023 DO - 10.1097/01.EEM.0000920072.89407.2d DP - journals.lww.com VL - 45 IS - 2 SP - 12 LA - en-US SN - 1054-0725 ST - Toxicology Rounds UR - https://journals.lww.com/em-news/Fulltext/2023/02000/Toxicology_Rounds__Is_Mastodon_the_New_Twitter_for.11.aspx?context=LatestArticles Y2 - 2024/01/10/12:14:04 L2 - https://journals.lww.com/em-news/Fulltext/2023/02000/Toxicology_Rounds__Is_Mastodon_the_New_Twitter_for.11.aspx?context=LatestArticles ER - TY - JOUR TI - Shifting your research from X to Mastodon? Here’s what you need to know AU - Abbing, Roel Roscam AU - Gehl, Robert W. T2 - Patterns DA - 2024/01/12/ PY - 2024 DO - 10.1016/j.patter.2023.100914 DP - www.cell.com VL - 5 IS - 1 J2 - PATTER LA - English SN - 2666-3899 ST - Shifting your research from X to Mastodon? UR - https://www.cell.com/patterns/abstract/S2666-3899(23)00323-9 Y2 - 2024/04/22/12:35:17 L1 - http://www.cell.com/article/S2666389923003239/pdf L2 - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/38264715 ER - TY - JOUR TI - Showing your ass on Mastodon: Lossy distribution, hashtag activism, and public scrutiny on federated, feral social media AU - Dunbar-Hester, Christina T2 - First Monday AB - This paper presents an account of technopolitics in Mastodon, noncommercial, decentralized social media. Mastodon’s significance has further risen in light of Twitter/X’s recent decimation of its public sphere functions; a noncommercial and ideally public alternative to commercial social media is (even more) urgently needed. The autoethnographic narrative presented here, hinging on a dispute initiated and sustained by an intemperate donkeykeeper in Europe, is idiosyncratic, to say the least. But it reveals meaningful aspects of the network’s features, which point to both the promise of such an architecture and to how it falls short in hailing other users and facilitating transparent communication, two important and related functions in democratic communication online. If we appraise Mastodon in view of civic commitments, this peculiar episode contains lessons for thinking about distribution, conviviality, and their intersections in social media. I show how Mastodon has been designed for “lossy distribution” and argue that this has implications for optimizing democratic functions of noncommercial social media. DA - 2024/03/09/ PY - 2024 DO - 10.5210/fm.v29i3.13367 DP - firstmonday.org LA - en SN - 1396-0466 ST - Showing your ass on Mastodon UR - https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13367 Y2 - 2024/04/22/12:35:22 L1 - https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/download/13367/11592 ER - TY - GEN TI - Everyone Everywhere All at Once: The Fediverse Problem AU - Mahadeva, Nikhil AB - Recent history has seen the increased adoption of decentralized social networking, also known as federated social networks, by everyone from regular users to the European Union. However, the incentive structures that make current regulation of interactive service providers functional rests on presumptions that apply to conventional social media but not to federated social networks---federated social networks are not-for-profit entities and do not rely on data collection and ad sales to exist. When everyone can operate their own social media network, with little incentive to moderate under existing law, it can only be expected that our long-standing expectations of a sanitized experience break down. The focus of this paper is on the issue of how current law, if left unchanged, will grant sweeping immunity on a far wider level than could have been imagined in 1996, while simultaneously leaving gaps that will no longer be as effectively filled by the self-preservation instincts of conventional social media networks. CY - Rochester, NY DA - 2024/01/15/ PY - 2024 DO - 10.2139/ssrn.4716427 DP - Social Science Research Network LA - en ST - Everyone Everywhere All at Once UR - https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=4716427 Y2 - 2024/04/22/12:35:24 L1 - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID4716427_code6479965.pdf?abstractid=4716427&mirid=1 KW - Instagram KW - Internet KW - Communication KW - Twitter KW - Social Media KW - Technology KW - Mastodon KW - Section 230 KW - ActivityPub KW - Content KW - Decentralized KW - Digital KW - EU KW - Facebook KW - Federated KW - Immunity KW - Law KW - Meta KW - MeWe KW - Moderation KW - Networking KW - PeerTube KW - Privacy KW - Protocol KW - Regulation KW - Tech KW - X KW - YouTube ER - TY - JOUR TI - Análisis de la investigación sobre el Fediverso: Mastodon, Lemmy, Pleroma y otras de sus plataformas AU - Lázaro-Rodríguez, Pedro T2 - Infonomy AB - This article presents the results of an analysis of the research about the Fediverse, Mastodon, Lemmy, Pleroma, and other fediverse platforms, considering 60 documents retrieved. Publications increase in 2022 and 2023, coinciding with Elon Musk's arrival on Twitter and the so-called waves of migration to Mastodon. The main type of document is the conference article, followed by scientific journal articles and preprints. Much of the publications are open access or free and English is the main language. On the other hand, the main topic is the nature of the Fediverse and its values of federation, decentralization, openness, and its horizontal structure based on instances. Other important topics are the analysis of contents and consumption, and activism. Finally, the article focuses on the relationship between the scientific community and the Fediverse, commenting on some cases of unethical treatment and collection of data from the people in the Fediverse, and highlighting and thinking about the relationship between the values of the federated universe and those of open science. DA - 2024/03/06/ PY - 2024 DO - 10.3145/infonomy.24.017 DP - infonomy.scimagoepi.com VL - 2 IS - 2 LA - es SN - 2990-2290 ST - Análisis de la investigación sobre el Fediverso UR - https://infonomy.scimagoepi.com/index.php/infonomy/article/view/34 Y2 - 2024/04/22/12:35:28 L1 - https://infonomy.scimagoepi.com/index.php/infonomy/article/download/34/62 KW - Mastodon KW - Fediverso KW - Redes sociales KW - Ciencia abierta KW - Comunidad científica KW - Descentralización KW - Federación KW - Instancias KW - Lemmy KW - Pleroma KW - Software libre ER - TY - GEN TI - The Effects of Group Sanctions on Participation and Toxicity: Quasi-experimental Evidence from the Fediverse AU - Colglazier, Carl AU - TeBlunthuis, Nathan AU - Shaw, Aaron AB - 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 (disconnection) to block communication between members of specific communities. We investigate the effects of defederation in the context of the Fediverse, a set of decentralized, interconnected social networks with independent governance. Mastodon and Pleroma, the most popular software powering the Fediverse, allow administrators on one server to defederate from another. We use a difference-in-differences approach and matched controls to estimate the effects of defederation events on participation and message toxicity among affected members of the blocked and blocking servers. We find that defederation causes a drop in activity for accounts on the blocked servers, but not on the blocking servers. Also, we find no evidence of an effect of defederation on message toxicity. DA - 2024/04/02/ PY - 2024 DO - 10.48550/arXiv.2404.02109 DP - arXiv.org PB - arXiv ST - The Effects of Group Sanctions on Participation and Toxicity UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/2404.02109 Y2 - 2024/04/22/12:35:31 L1 - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.02109.pdf L2 - https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.02109 KW - Computer Science - Social and Information Networks KW - Computer Science - Human-Computer Interaction ER - TY - CONF TI - An Exploration of Decentralized Moderation on Mastodon AU - Bono, Carlo Alberto AU - La Cava, Lucio AU - Luceri, Luca AU - Pierri, Francesco T3 - WEBSCI '24 AB - Decentralized Online Social Networks (DOSNs) are rising as a valid alternative to traditional centralized platforms like X (Twitter) and Facebook. Mastodon is to date the most widely recognized decentralized social media service. Thousands of servers have been deployed in the last few years due to the availability of open-source software which allows anyone to easily join the network of interconnected servers. Nonetheless, akin to other social media, Mastodon encompasses instances that host harmful or inappropriate content, which demands moderation. However, the decentralized nature of Mastodon servers poses novel challenges for content moderation. In this work, we explore the dynamics of decentralized moderation on Mastodon through the main tool offered to servers’ administrators, namely blocklisting servers to prevent users of an instance from interacting with the content of these servers. Our goal is to shed light on the main traits that characterize blocklisted instances on Mastodon and investigate the emergence of common blocklisting patterns toward specific groups of instances. C1 - New York, NY, USA C3 - Proceedings of the 16th ACM Web Science Conference DA - 2024/05/21/ PY - 2024 DO - 10.1145/3614419.3644016 DP - ACM Digital Library SP - 53 EP - 58 PB - Association for Computing Machinery SN - 9798400703348 UR - https://doi.org/10.1145/3614419.3644016 Y2 - 2024/04/22/ KW - Mastodon KW - Content KW - Moderation KW - Network KW - Social ER - TY - GEN TI - Decentralised Moderation for Interoperable Social Networks: A Conversation-based Approach for Pleroma and the Fediverse AU - Agarwal, Vibhor AU - Raman, Aravindh AU - Sastry, Nishanth AU - Abdelmoniem, Ahmed M. AU - Tyson, Gareth AU - Castro, Ignacio AB - The recent development of decentralised and interoperable social networks (such as the "fediverse") creates new challenges for content moderators. This is because millions of posts generated on one server can easily "spread" to another, even if the recipient server has very different moderation policies. An obvious solution would be to leverage moderation tools to automatically tag (and filter) posts that contravene moderation policies, e.g. related to toxic speech. Recent work has exploited the conversational context of a post to improve this automatic tagging, e.g. using the replies to a post to help classify if it contains toxic speech. This has shown particular potential in environments with large training sets that contain complete conversations. This, however, creates challenges in a decentralised context, as a single conversation may be fragmented across multiple servers. Thus, each server only has a partial view of an entire conversation because conversations are often federated across servers in a non-synchronized fashion. To address this, we propose a decentralised conversation-aware content moderation approach suitable for the fediverse. Our approach employs a graph deep learning model (GraphNLI) trained locally on each server. The model exploits local data to train a model that combines post and conversational information captured through random walks to detect toxicity. We evaluate our approach with data from Pleroma, a major decentralised and interoperable micro-blogging network containing 2 million conversations. Our model effectively detects toxicity on larger instances, exclusively trained using their local post information (0.8837 macro-F1). Our approach has considerable scope to improve moderation in decentralised and interoperable social networks such as Pleroma or Mastodon. DA - 2024/04/16/ PY - 2024 DO - 10.48550/arXiv.2404.03048 DP - arXiv.org PB - arXiv ST - Decentralised Moderation for Interoperable Social Networks UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/2404.03048 Y2 - 2024/04/22/12:35:33 L1 - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.03048.pdf L2 - https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.03048 KW - Computer Science - Computation and Language KW - Computer Science - Computers and Society ER - TY - JOUR TI - Studying the Adoption of Mastodon: A Systematic Literature AU - Sabo, Eduard AU - Gesthuizen, Tim T2 - 21st SC@ RUG 2023-2024 DA - 2024/04/22/12:35:59 PY - 2024 DP - Google Scholar SP - 8 ST - Studying the Adoption of Mastodon UR - https://research.rug.nl/files/975865684/proceedings.pdf#page=11 Y2 - 2024/04/22/12:35:59 L1 - https://research.rug.nl/files/975865684/proceedings.pdf#page=11 ER - TY - CONF TI - Das Fediverse: Social Media im Wandel AU - Kuketz, Mike T2 - Das Recht der Daten im Kontext der Digitalen Ethik DA - 2024/04/22/ PY - 2024 DO - 10.5771/9783748944461-167 DP - www.nomos-elibrary.de SP - 167 EP - 184 LA - de PB - Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG SN - 978-3-7560-1716-4 978-3-7489-4446-1 ST - Das Fediverse UR - https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/10.5771/9783748944461-167/das-fediverse-social-media-im-wandel?page=1 Y2 - 2024/04/27/06:15:01 L1 - https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/10.5771/9783748944461-167.pdf ER - TY - CONF TI - Polarization in Decentralized Online Social Networks AU - La Cava, Lucio AU - Mandaglio, Domenico AU - Tagarelli, Andrea T3 - WEBSCI '24 AB - 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 accessibility of open-source software, enabling anyone to create a new instance (i.e., server) and participate in a decentralized network known as Fediverse. Despite this growing momentum, there has been a lack of studies addressing the effect of positive and negative interactions among instances within DOSNs. This work aims to fill this gap by presenting a preliminary examination of instances’ polarization in DOSNs, focusing on Mastodon — the most widely recognized decentralized social media platform, boasting over 10M users and nearly 20K instances to date. Our results suggest that polarization in the Fediverse emerges in unique ways, influenced by the desire to foster a federated environment between instances, also facilitating the isolation of instances that may pose potential risks to the Fediverse. C1 - New York, NY, USA C3 - Proceedings of the 16th ACM Web Science Conference DA - 2024/05/21/ PY - 2024 DO - 10.1145/3614419.3644013 DP - ACM Digital Library SP - 48 EP - 52 PB - Association for Computing Machinery SN - 9798400703348 UR - https://doi.org/10.1145/3614419.3644013 Y2 - 2024/04/28/ L1 - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.05668 KW - Mastodon KW - Fediverse KW - Polarization KW - Signed Network ER - TY - THES TI - From Network to Platform to Protocol: Mastodon’s Ethos and the Sociotechnical Imaginary of the Fediverse AU - Mönnink, Skip de AB - The sociotechnical imaginary of the Fediverse, a network of alternative social media (ASM), is one wherein technology empowers the marginalized, fosters community participation, and challenges the monopolistic tendencies of corporate social media (CSM), ultimately advocating for a more equitable and democratic Internet landscape. This master thesis examines how the sociotechnical imaginary constructed by the Fediverse, focusing on the ethos of Mastodon, is engaged in counter-hegemonic struggle against CSM to reshape the vision of social networks as open-source networks instead of proprietary platforms. By combining media genealogy with critical discourse analysis, this research found (i) Mastodon as an ASM is committed to open participation, decentralization, and community-oriented social media, based on Free/Libre Open-Source Software (FLOSS) ideology. This (ii) ethos contains traces of earlier networks like Usenet, embodying democratic values and anarcho- syndicalist principles. Finally, (iii) that the open-source protocol ActivityPub is key to realizing the sociotechnical imaginary of a democratic Internet. The open-source protocol perspective reveals how Mastodon supersedes the existing dichotomous understanding of ASM as it creates a network that is open while consciously limiting the ability to network, to expand its ability to connect. DA - 2024/// PY - 2024 DP - studenttheses.uu.nl LA - EN M3 - Master Thesis ST - From Network to Platform to Protocol UR - https://studenttheses.uu.nl/handle/20.500.12932/46353 Y2 - 2024/05/08/06:02:09 L1 - https://studenttheses.uu.nl/bitstream/20.500.12932/46353/1/4520467_Skip_de_Monnink_Thesis.pdf ER - TY - JOUR TI - Time for Medicine and Public Health to Leave Platform X AU - Timpka, Toomas T2 - JMIR Medical Education AB - Digital technologies have for more than fifty years been employed for creation and distribution of knowledge in health services. Adding to applications for clinical decision support and population health monitoring, digital social media have in the recent decade been employed for knowledge translation, i.e. used in the process where research findings created in academic settings are established as evidence and distributed for use in clinical practice, policymaking, and self-management of health. Until today, it has been considered normal for medical and public health institutions to have social media accounts for dissemination of novel research findings and facilitating conversation about these. However, recent events such as the transformation of the microblog Twitter to platform X has brought to light the fact that the social media industry needs to exploit user data to generate revenue. In this Viewpoint article, it is argued that a redirection is required of social media use in the translation of knowledge to action in medicine and public health. A new kind of social internet is currently forming. The fediverse denotes an ensemble of open social media that can communicate with each other, while remaining independent platforms. In several countries, government institutions, universities and newspapers use open social media to distribute information and enable discussions. They control their own channels while being able to communicate with other platforms through open standards. Examples of medical knowledge translation at open social media platforms where users are less exposed to disinformation are also beginning to appear. The current status of the social media industry calls for a broad discussion about the use of social technologies by health institutions involving researchers and health service practitioners, academic leaders, scientific publishers, social technology providers, policymakers, and the public. This debate should not primarily take place on social media platforms, but at universities, in scientific journals, at public seminars, and other venues allowing transparent and undisturbed communication and formation of opinions. DA - 2024/05/24/ PY - 2024 DO - 10.2196/53810 DP - mededu.jmir.org VL - 10 IS - 1 SP - e53810 LA - EN UR - https://mededu.jmir.org/2024/1/e53810 Y2 - 2024/06/02/10:51:39 L2 - https://mededu.jmir.org/2024/1/e53810 ER - TY - CHAP TI - Moderating the Fediverse: Content Moderation on Distributed Social Media AU - Rozenshtein, Alan Z. T2 - Media and Society After Technological Disruption A2 - Hurwitz, Justin (Gus) A2 - Langvardt, Kyle AB - Current approaches to content moderation generally assume the continued dominance of “walled gardens”: social-media platforms that control who can use their services and how. Whether the discussion is about self-regulation, quasi-public regulation (e.g., Facebook’s Oversight Board), government regulation, tort law (including changes to Section 230), or antitrust enforcement, the assumption is that the future of social media will remain a matter of incrementally reforming a small group of giant, closed platforms. But, viewed from the perspective of the broader history of the internet, the dominance of closed platforms is an aberration. The internet initially grew around a set of open, decentralized applications, many of which remain central to its functioning today. CY - Cambridge DA - 2024/// PY - 2024 DP - Cambridge University Press SP - 177 EP - 192 PB - Cambridge University Press SN - 978-1-00-918477-9 ST - Moderating the Fediverse UR - https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/media-and-society-after-technological-disruption/moderating-the-fediverse/A9018A2868DBE98ED59BA66BC6C25913 Y2 - 2024/06/02/10:51:43 L1 - https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/A9018A2868DBE98ED59BA66BC6C25913/9781009174428c15_177-192.pdf/moderating-the-fediverse.pdf L2 - https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/media-and-society-after-technological-disruption/moderating-the-fediverse/A9018A2868DBE98ED59BA66BC6C25913 KW - social media KW - Mastodon KW - Content moderation KW - First Amendment KW - freedom of speech ER - TY - THES TI - Improving Content Moderation in the Fediverse AU - Anaobi, I. H. AB - The Fediverse is experiencing a growth in popularity, becoming a viable alternative to Twitter and other “centralised” social networks. The recent acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk, which has sparked controversy, has further intensified this phenomenon. The Fediverse encompasses an expanding array of decentralised social networks, such as Pleroma and Mastodon, which all share the same social federation protocol, known as ActivityPub. Each of these decentralised social networks is composed of independent servers (aka ”instances”) run by different administrators. Users can create accounts on any given server, allowing them to use the platform. Importantly, servers can then “federate” together in a peer-to-peer fashion, allowing users to interact with individuals on other servers. This creates a physically decentralized system that underpins a global set of interconnections. The general concept of the Fediverse is appealing as it promises increased openness and freedom of speech. This level of freedom, however, also creates a conducive environment for the growth of toxic communities. There is therefore need for content moderation. This important task lies with specialized users on the instances referred to as administrators. Such users are responsible for managing all aspects of the server and community. In centralized platforms, there are ongoing initiatives to automate the moderation process, not to mention the large pool of paid human resources. On the contrary, instance administrators within the Fediverse frequently run their instances as volunteers, and the majority of their moderation activities are carried out manually. For example, this may involve reviewing posts and deleting any that contravene certain terms of service. Because of this, “amateur” platforms have developed strategies to make the procedure easier to perform, often sacrificing the quality of decision making. This thesis therefore argues that it would be beneficial to propose ways to inject some automation into the process. The above motivates the research. The major goal of this thesis is to understand how content moderation is carried out in the Fediverse, identify what challenges are faced, and propose solutions to these challenges. To achieve this goal, we first conduct a large-scale measurement campaign to collect data. As a case study of the Fediverse, the measurements focus on one platform called Pleroma. Pleroma is a microblogging platform that has comparable functionality to Twitter. We then characterize Pleroma with the aim of understanding how administrators moderate currently. We then identify and quantify the challenges with the current mode. Lastly, we create and develop proposed efficient moderation frameworks that are specifically customised to the decentralised structure of online social networks. This thesis therefore offers a comprehensive analysis of the Fediverse, focusing on the historical development and underlying principles of instance federation and the construction of the Fediverse. A key theme throughout the thesis is identifying major challenges that do not exist in prior ”centralised” solutions. Due to the unique characteristics of the Fediverse, there exist a variety of challenges that are inherent in the task of collecting data from Fediverse platforms. To address this, in Chapter 3, we propose a data collection approach for both our preferred platform, Pleroma, and a comparable platform, Mastodon. We then proceed to characterise our dataset and offer an understanding of the various user timelines that users can utilise for communication. Our categorization includes a significant discussion of the function of instance administrators in the Fediverse. Using the data, the thesis then focuses on one particular function in the Fediverse: content moderation. This is the process by which server administrators ensure that users obey the terms of service, e.g., removing hate speech or spam. The thesis offers insight into the different types of federation policies available to administrators, how administrators have applied these federation policies, and to which instances these policies are applied against. The thesis explores two problems in this domain. The first challenge that arises is the problem of “collateral damage”, explored in Chapter 4. Collateral damage refers to users who are impacted by the application of policies against their instance due to actions of other users on their same instance. For example, this happens when an entire instance is blocked due to the activities of just one person. We find evidence that over 95% of users on moderated instances experience such collateral damage. To address this concern, we make recommendations on the implementation of federation policies. Further, we develop a model capable of recommending certain instances to administrators that may require more nuanced moderation rather than an outright reject. It is possible to make accurate predictions (f1=0.76) regarding instances that require such finer grained moderation. One explanation for this collateral damage is that administrators do not have sufficient time to make fine-grained decisions regarding moderation. Thus, being overburdened, especially as volunteers, is another major challenge that administrators may encounter. Chapter 5 explore this issue. We find that instances are often “understaffed”, with the majority of instances only having a single administrator, and recruiting no other moderators to assist, despite many having over 100K posts. We investigate the extent of this overhead and examine potential strategies to mitigate its impact. We observe a diversity of administrator strategies, with evidence that administrators on larger instances struggle to find sufficient resources. We show that it is possible to predict (f1=0.85) which instances will have policies applied against them and design WatchGen, a tool that flags particular instances for administrators to pay special attention to. Pleroma is one example of a Fediverse platform and dataset collection in the Fediverse can be challenging. As a result, we believe it will be of significant benefit to be able to apply solutions built on one platform to another. For example, models built on data from Pleroma being applied to data from the Mastodon platform. In Chapter 6, we explore this possibility. For this investigation we use WatchGen from Chapter 5 to test this model transfer. We achieve promising results with an f1-score of 0.59 when applying WatchGen built exclusively on Pleroma data to Mastodon data. We believe this can be improved with more training data. The thesis is concluded in Chapter 7, bringing together the findings to highlight a clear set of remaining challenges. DA - 2024/06/20/T08:20:12Z PY - 2024 DP - qmro.qmul.ac.uk LA - en M3 - Thesis PB - Queen Mary University of London UR - https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/97538 Y2 - 2024/06/27/03:25:45 L1 - https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/bitstream/123456789/97538/2/Final%20Thesis.pdf ER - TY - JOUR TI - Open-Source Software, Fediverse and Custom ROMs as Tools for a Sustainable Internet AU - Rödiger, Stefan AU - Kögler, Martin AU - Birkholz, Mario DA - 2024/07/04/07:23:32 PY - 2024 DP - Google Scholar UR - https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Stefan-Roediger/publication/381773235_Open-Source_Software_Fediverse_and_Custom_ROMs_as_Tools_for_a_Sustainable_Internet/links/667e59a5714e0b03152fd660/Open-Source-Software-Fediverse-and-Custom-ROMs-as-Tools-for-a-Sustainable-Internet.pdf Y2 - 2024/07/04/07:23:32 L1 - https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Stefan-Roediger/publication/381773235_Open-Source_Software_Fediverse_and_Custom_ROMs_as_Tools_for_a_Sustainable_Internet/links/667e59a5714e0b03152fd660/Open-Source-Software-Fediverse-and-Custom-ROMs-as-Tools-for-a-Sustainable-Internet.pdf ER - TY - JOUR TI - Privacy Policies on the Fediverse: A Case Study of Mastodon Instances AU - Tosch, Emma AU - Garcia, Luis AU - Li, Cynthia AU - Martens, Chris T2 - Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies DA - 2024/// PY - 2024 DP - petsymposium.org SN - 2299-0984 ST - Privacy Policies on the Fediverse UR - https://petsymposium.org/popets/2024/popets-2024-0138.php Y2 - 2024/07/07/18:02:12 L1 - https://petsymposium.org/popets/2024/popets-2024-0138.pdf ER - TY - CHAP TI - Mastodon gegen Twitter, Fediverse gegen Facebook – Was kann das dezentrale Kommunikationsnetz besser? AU - Welchering, Peter T2 - Neue Plattformen – neue Öffentlichkeiten: KI, Krisen und Journalismus A2 - Hooffacker, Gabriele A2 - Kenntemich, Wolfgang A2 - Kulisch, Uwe AB - Journalismus steht unter Druck. Medienhäuser und Journalist*innen kämpfen mit digitalen Transformationsprozessen. Teilweise stehen sie den neuen Öffentlichkeiten, die sich auf neuen Plattformen bilden, ziemlich hilflos gegenüber. Teilweise lehnen sie ihnen bisher nicht bekannte Plattformen und die darauf vertretenen Teilöffentlichkeiten aus arroganter Selbstüberschätzung ab. Dabei haben Akteure und Kommunikatoren im Fediverse in der Vergangenheit durchaus bewiesen, dass mit dem Fediversum-Ansatz einige aktuelle Probleme des Journalismus durchaus gelöst werden können. Ein Blick darauf lohnt. CY - Wiesbaden DA - 2024/// PY - 2024 DP - Springer Link SP - 45 EP - 54 LA - de PB - Springer Fachmedien SN - 978-3-658-44659-8 UR - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-44659-8_4 Y2 - 2024/08/02/05:15:40 ER - TY - BOOK TI - Sistematična analiza decentraliziranih družbenih medijev AU - Polančič, Gregor AU - Brdnik, Saša AU - Perša, Tomi AB - Monografija z naslovom »Sistematična analiza decentraliziranih družbenih medijev« naslavlja prepoznano raziskovalno vrzel preučevanja decentraliziranih družbenih medijev. Pri tem je posebni poudarek na konceptualnem vidiku, ki omogoča prepoznavanje logične zasnove, arhitekturnih značilnosti, potencialov in specifik družbenega medija ter primerjavo s centraliziranimi sorodnimi rešitvami. Predstavlja zbirko medsebojno primerljivih poglavij, ki opisno in analitično preučujejo najvidnejše predstavnike pokrajine decentraliziranih družbenih medijev v letu 2024. Poglavja so rezultat projektne naloge študentov Univerze v Mariboru, Fakultete za elektrotehniko, računalništvo in informatiko, ki so v okviru predmeta »Arhitektura družbenih medijev« sistematično in mentorirano preučevali izbrane decentralizirane družbene medije. DA - 2024/05/13/ PY - 2024 DP - press.um.si LA - sl PB - Univerzitetna založba Univerze v Mariboru SN - 978-961-286-864-2 UR - https://press.um.si/index.php/ump/catalog/book/857 Y2 - 2024/08/02/05:15:43 L1 - https://press.um.si/index.php/ump/catalog/download/857/1277/4084 KW - social media KW - Fediverse KW - students KW - Analiza decentraliziranih družbenih medijev KW - analysis KW - Decentralised social media analysis KW - decentralised social media design KW - družbeni mediji KW - študenti KW - zasnova decentraliziranih družbenih medijev ER - TY - JOUR TI - An update on Rogue Scholar in the fediverse AU - Fenner, Martin T2 - Front Matter AB - The Rogue Scholar science blogging archive joined the fediverse in August of last year. This week I want to report on an updated strategy for Rogue Scholar, and what it means for science blogs participating in Rogue Scholar. The fediverse is a collection of community-owned, ad-free, decentralised, and privacy-centric social DA - 2024/01/29/ PY - 2024 DO - 10.53731/dnfg0-hge29 DP - blog.front-matter.io LA - en UR - https://doi.org/10.53731/dnfg0-hge29 Y2 - 2024/08/02/05:15:45 L2 - https://blog.front-matter.io/posts/an-update-on-the-rogue-scholar-fediverse/ ER - TY - JOUR TI - Rogue Scholar joins the Fediverse AU - Fenner, Martin T2 - Front Matter AB - Today I am happy to announce that the Rogue Scholar science blog archive has joined the Fediverse, the federated social network that communicates using the ActivityPub protocol. I have launched a Mastodon instance at Rogue Scholar Social that accepts Science Blog bots as accounts, publishing summaries of blog posts. Science DA - 2023/08/21/ PY - 2023 DO - 10.53731/f1mhr-wps22 DP - blog.front-matter.io LA - en UR - https://doi.org/10.53731/f1mhr-wps22 Y2 - 2024/08/02/05:15:48 L2 - https://blog.front-matter.io/posts/rogue-scholar-joins-fediverse/ ER - TY - JOUR TI - A Mastodon Corpus to Evaluate Federated Microblog Search AU - Wiegmann, Matti AU - Reimer, Jan Heinrich AU - Ernst, Maximilian AU - Potthast, Martin AU - Hagen, Matthias AU - Stein, Benno DA - 2024/// PY - 2024 DP - Zotero LA - en L1 - https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3689/WOWS_2024_paper_5.pdf ER - TY - GEN TI - Trust and Safety Risks and Engineering Patterns Through the Lens of Issue Resolution: An Empirical Case Study in Mastodon and Diaspora AU - Cramer, Geoffrey AU - Maxam III, William P. AU - Davis, James AB - Trust & Safety (T&S) Engineering is an emerging area of software engineering that mitigates the risks of harmful interactions in online platforms. Numerous studies have explored T&S risks on social media, taxonomizing threats and investigating individual issues. However, there is limited empirical knowledge about engineering efforts to promote T&S. This study examines T&S risks and the engineering patterns to resolve them. We conducted a case study of the two largest decentralised SMPs: Mastodon and Diaspora. These SMPs are open-source, so we analyzed T&S discussions within 60 GitHub issues. We analyzed T&S discussions that took place in their online repository and extracted T&S risks, T&S engineering patterns, and resolution rationales considered by the engineers. We integrate our findings by mapping T&S engineering patterns onto a general model of SMPs, to give SMP engineers a systematic understanding of their T&S risk treatment options. We report that T&S issues are a challenge throughout the feature set and lifespan of an SMP. A taxonomy of 12 solution patterns are developed, paving the way for academia and industry to standardize Trust & Safety solutions. We conclude with future directions to study and improve T&S Engineering, spanning software design, decision-making, and validation CY - Rochester, NY DA - 2024/03/22/ PY - 2024 DO - 10.2139/ssrn.4768911 DP - Social Science Research Network LA - en ST - Trust and Safety Risks and Engineering Patterns Through the Lens of Issue Resolution UR - https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=4768911 Y2 - 2024/08/02/05:35:53 L1 - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/253959e7-22da-4d0c-bc6d-1d81f0d7c556-MECA.pdf?abstractid=4768911&mirid=1 KW - Empirical software engineering KW - Engineering decision-making KW - Risk KW - Social media platforms KW - Trust & Safety engineering ER - TY - JOUR TI - Exploring Platform Migration Patterns between Twitter and Mastodon: A User Behavior Study AU - Jeong, Ujun AU - Sheth, Paras AU - Tahir, Anique AU - Alatawi, Faisal AU - Bernard, H. Russell AU - Liu, Huan T2 - Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media AB - 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 process. In this study, we elaborate on how we investigate these questions by collecting data over 10,000 users who migrated from Twitter to Mastodon within the first ten weeks following the ownership change of Twitter. Our research is structured in three primary steps. First, we develop algorithms to extract and analyze migration patterns. Second, by leveraging behavioral analysis, we examine the distinct architectures of Twitter and Mastodon to learn how user behaviors correspond with the characteristics of each platform. Last, we determine how particular behavioral factors influence users to stay on Mastodon. We share our findings of user migration, insights, and lessons learned from the user behavior study. DA - 2024/05/28/ PY - 2024 DO - 10.1609/icwsm.v18i1.31348 DP - ojs.aaai.org VL - 18 SP - 738 EP - 750 LA - en SN - 2334-0770 ST - Exploring Platform Migration Patterns between Twitter and Mastodon UR - https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/view/31348 Y2 - 2024/08/02/05:36:01 L1 - https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/ICWSM/article/download/31348/33508 ER - TY - JOUR TI - Automatización y mantenimiento de un servidor Mastodon AU - Rodríguez-García, Marcos AB - En este proyecto, se explica cómo se ha llevado a cabo el desarrollo de la automatización de la instalación y el mantenimiento de un servidor de Mastodon, una red social descentralizada y de código abierto similar a Twitter, con el uso de Ansible, un potente software de automatización. Algunos de los temas que se tratan son las tecnologías utilizadas, las metodologías usadas para el desarrollo y la arquitectura de los componentes del proyecto. DA - 2024/06/25/ PY - 2024 DP - burjcdigital.urjc.es LA - spa UR - https://eciencia.urjc.es/handle/10115/35039 Y2 - 2024/08/02/05:36:04 L2 - https://burjcdigital.urjc.es/handle/10115/35039 ER - TY - MANSCPT TI - A Kantian Right to Fediverse Access, Or: For a Digital Enlightenment on the Social Web AU - Bingemann, Jan Niklas DA - 2024/// PY - 2024 DP - PhilPapers ST - A Kantian Right to Fediverse Access, Or L2 - https://philpapers.org/rec/BINAKR ER - TY - CONF TI - Decentralized Networks Growth Analysis: Instance Dynamics on Mastodon AU - Sabo, Eduard AU - Riveni, Mirela AU - Karastoyanova, Dimka A2 - Cherifi, Hocine A2 - Rocha, Luis M. A2 - Cherifi, Chantal A2 - Donduran, Murat AB - Federated social networks have become an appealing choice as alternatives to mainstream centralized platforms. In the current global context, where the user’s activity on various social networks is monitored, influenced and manipulated, alternative platforms that offer the possibility of owning and controlling one’s own data are of great importance. Mastodon stands out among decentralized alternatives in the fediverse. C1 - Cham C3 - Complex Networks & Their Applications XII DA - 2024/// PY - 2024 DO - 10.1007/978-3-031-53503-1_30 DP - Springer Link SP - 366 EP - 377 LA - en PB - Springer Nature Switzerland SN - 978-3-031-53503-1 ST - Decentralized Networks Growth Analysis ER - TY - GEN TI - Taming the Free: Content moderation in the Fediverse and the Role of the DSAThe current legal framework for content moderation in the Digital Services Act (DSA) is focused on centralized digital services. This makes it challeng
CY - Rochester, NY
DA - 2024/06/26/
PY - 2024
DP - Social Science Research Network
LA - en
ST - Taming the Free
UR - https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=4886386
Y2 - 2024/08/05/04:55:40
L1 - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/4886386.pdf?abstractid=4886386&mirid=1
KW - content moderation
KW - fediverse
KW - compliance
KW - decentralised social media platforms
KW - digital services act
KW - dsa
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - Do Servers Matter on Mastodon? Data-driven Design for Decentralized Social Media
AU - Colglazier, Carl
AB - When trying to join Mastodon, a decentralized collection of interoperable social networking servers, new users face the dilemma of choosing a home server. Using trace data from millions of new Mastodon accounts, we show that new accounts are less likely to remain active on the network’s largest general instances compared to others. Additionally, we observe a trend of users migrating from larger to smaller servers. Addressing the challenge of onboarding and server selection, the paper proposes a decentralized recommendation system for server using hashtags and the Okapi BM25 algorithm. This system leverages servers’ top hashtags and their frequency to create a recommendation mechanism that respects Mastodon’s decentralized ethos.
DA - 2024///
PY - 2024
DO - https://workshop-proceedings.icwsm.org/pdf/2024_43.pdf
DP - Zotero
LA - en
L1 - https://workshop-proceedings.icwsm.org/pdf/2024_43.pdf
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - “Don’t research us”—How Mastodon instance rules connect to research ethics
AU - Wähner, Marco
AU - Deubel, Annika
AU - Breuer, Johannes
AU - Weller, Katrin
T2 - Publizistik
AB - Mastodon is a decentralized social network that has recently gained in popularity due to the platform changes of Twitter (now X). When it comes to collecting and analyzing data, the technical structure of such a decentralized network not only has methodological but also ethical implications. Mastodon consists of a large number of individual instances (around 17k), and each of these instances typically have their own set of rules, which may also address the use of data. Against this backdrop, we investigated whether and how Mastodon instances address the scientific use of data. Our analyses focused on active instances with English-language rules. Based on a combination of quantitative and qualitative content analysis, our results show that only a small portion of instances mention the scientific use of their data. Instead, the majority of rules rather focuses on user behavior and interactions. Based on the results, we formulate recommendations for researchers who want to work with Mastodon data. The recommendations are informed by the results of our empirical study and guided by general ethical principles for the examination of data from social media.
DA - 2024/08/01/
PY - 2024
DO - 10.1007/s11616-024-00855-6
DP - Springer Link
VL - 69
IS - 3
SP - 357
EP - 380
J2 - Publizistik
LA - en
SN - 1862-2569
UR - https://doi.org/10.1007/s11616-024-00855-6
Y2 - 2024/08/25/09:16:19
L1 - https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs11616-024-00855-6.pdf
KW - Social Media
KW - Mastodon
KW - Artificial Intelligence
KW - Forschungsethik
KW - Medical Ethics
KW - Research Ethics
KW - Text Analysis
KW - Textanalyse
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - Análisis del cambio climático en Mastodon mediante técnicas de minería de datos y redes sociales
AU - Raduán Llopis, Victoria
AB - Este trabajo de fin de grado examina cómo las personas ven el cambio climático y las tendencias en la red social descentralizada Mastodon. Se abordan las limitaciones de plataformas centralizadas como Twitter, que tienen sesgos algorítmicos y limitan el acceso a los datos. El análisis de sentimientos, de redes sociales y la minería de datos se utilizan para explorar los debates climáticos. Se ha utilizado la API de Mastodon, almacenamiento en MongoDB, integración en Neo4j y análisis. Los hallazgos muestran patrones como la polaridad de las opiniones, los temas más debatidos, las comunidades de usuarios y los influenciadores principales. Se analiza cómo la actividad de los usuarios está relacionada con los eventos políticos o climáticos relevantes. Las conclusiones indican que las redes sociales descentralizadas son cruciales para estudiar el discurso sobre este tema importante, ya que brindan una perspectiva más diversa. Este documento mejora la comprensión de la percepción pública y las dinámicas sociales relacionadas con este problema ambiental.
DA - 2024/06//
PY - 2024
DP - titula.universidadeuropea.com
LA - spa
UR - http://titula.universidadeuropea.com/handle/20.500.12880/8876
Y2 - 2024/08/31/17:16:38
L1 - http://titula.universidadeuropea.com/bitstream/20.500.12880/8876/1/TFG_VICTORIA%20RADUAN.pdf
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - Trouble in paradise? understanding Mastodon Admin's motivations, experiences, and challenges running decentralised social media
AU - Zhang, Z.
AU - Zhao, J.
AU - Wang, G.
AU - Johnston, S.-K.
AU - Chalhoub, G.
AU - Ross, T.
AU - Liu, D.
AU - Tinsman, C.
AU - Zhao, R.
AU - Van Kleek, M.
AU - Shadbolt, N.
AB - Decentralised social media platforms are increasingly being recognised as viable alternatives to their centralised counterparts. Among these, Mastodon stands out as a popular alternative, offering a citizen-powered option distinct from larger and centralised platforms like Twitter/X. However, the future path of Mastodon remains uncertain, particularly in terms of its challenges and the long-term viability of a more citizen-powered internet. In this paper, following a pre-study survey, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 16 Mastodon instance administrators, including those who host instances to support marginalised and stigmatised communities, to understand their motivations and lived experiences of running decentralised social media. Our research indicates that while decentralised social media offers significant potential in supporting the safety, identity and privacy needs of marginalised and stigmatised communities, they also face considerable challenges in content moderation, community building and governance. We emphasise the importance of considering the community’s values and diversity when designing future support mechanisms.
DA - 2024///
PY - 2024
DP - ora.ox.ac.uk
LA - English
ST - Trouble in paradise?
UR - https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:9e9ea5d1-f02b-4f65-8f83-9a72e9e46213
Y2 - 2024/08/31/17:16:45
L1 - https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:9e9ea5d1-f02b-4f65-8f83-9a72e9e46213/files/s9593tw968
ER -
TY - GEN
TI - An evidence-based and critical analysis of the Fediverse decentralization promises
AU - Xavier, Henrique S.
AB - 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 powering the Fediverse (especially the ActivityPub protocol), current statistical data regarding Fediverse user distribution over instances, and the status of two older, similar, decentralized technologies: e-mail and the Web. Our findings suggest that Fediverse will face significant challenges in fulfilling its decentralization promises, potentially hindering its ability to positively impact the social Web on a large scale.
DA - 2024/08/27/
PY - 2024
DO - 10.48550/arXiv.2408.15383
DP - arXiv.org
PB - arXiv
UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/2408.15383
Y2 - 2024/08/31/17:16:46
L1 - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2408.15383.pdf
L2 - http://arxiv.org/abs/2408.15383
KW - Computer Science - Computers and Society
ER -
TY - CHAP
TI - Decentralised Networks as a Tool for Fighting Disinformation and Censorship: The Fediverse and Free, Collaborative and Open Networks
AU - Salaverría, Ramón
AU - Martínez-Costa, María-Pilar
AU - González Tosat, Clara
T2 - Journalism, Digital Media and the Fourth Industrial Revolution
A2 - Sixto-García, José
A2 - Quian, Alberto
A2 - Rodríguez-Vázquez, Ana-Isabel
A2 - Silva-Rodríguez, Alba
A2 - Soengas-Pérez, Xosé
AB - The presence of disinformation and hate speech has multiplied on several centralised social networks. Since its purchase by Elon Musk in 2022, Twitter (renamed X) has taken controversial measures to increase profits, at the cost of degrading the content offered to users. Other networks, such as TikTok, are suspected of serving as a resource for international espionage, or of stimulating addictive behaviour among minors. Faced with the threats derived from the strategy of these social networks, decentralised network alternatives are emerging, including the so-called fediverse of networks such as Mastodon, with models based on open collaboration and dynamics far removed from the trending topics. This chapter analyses the recent evolution of centralised social networks, showing the problems derived from their transformation. It then analyses the opportunities and limitations of decentralised networks as a resource for overcoming these problems. In particular, it explores the resilience of these networks as a tool for combatting disinformation and censorship.
CY - Cham
DA - 2024///
PY - 2024
DP - Springer Link
SP - 15
EP - 25
LA - en
PB - Springer Nature Switzerland
SN - 978-3-031-63153-5
ST - Decentralised Networks as a Tool for Fighting Disinformation and Censorship
UR - https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-63153-5_2
Y2 - 2024/09/06/04:26:43
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - An analysis of mastodon adoption dynamics based on instance types
AU - Sabo, Eduard
AU - Gesthuizen, Tim
AU - Bouma, Kelvin J. A.
AU - Karastoyanova, Dimka
AU - Riveni, Mirela
T2 - Social Network Analysis and Mining
AB - Federated social networks have become an appealing choice as alternatives to mainstream centralized platforms. In the current global context, where the user’s activity on various social networks is monitored, influenced and manipulated, alternative platforms that offer the possibility of owning and controlling one’s own data are of great importance. Mastodon stands out among decentralized alternatives in the fediverse. In this study, we conduct a time-based dynamics analysis of various Mastodon instances, from popular ones to country-specific servers. Moreover, we conducted an analysis of registration account dynamics based on certain topics, such as academic, political and activism in general. Throughout the paper, we reveal the user adoption of Mastodon from multiple instances and metrics. Our results show a growth pattern of instances in terms of accounts in certain periods of time, and due to social events, reinforcing our assumption of it being already trusted as a decentralized platform. Our work holds significance in the wider context of studying and understanding the adoption rates of decentralized networks as ethical alternatives to centrally controlled ones.
DA - 2024/09/07/
PY - 2024
DO - 10.1007/s13278-024-01341-7
DP - Springer Link
VL - 14
IS - 1
SP - 184
J2 - Soc. Netw. Anal. Min.
LA - en
SN - 1869-5469
UR - https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-024-01341-7
Y2 - 2024/09/09/13:13:15
L1 - https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs13278-024-01341-7.pdf
KW - Mastodon
KW - Decentralized social networks
KW - Artificial Intelligence
KW - Decentralized systems
KW - Privacy in networks
KW - User adoption
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - Periodismo y redes sociales alternativas del Fediverso: estudio de la presencia de medios nativos digitales y matriciales en Mastodon
AU - Quian, Alberto
AU - López-García, Xosé
AU - Soengas-Pérez, Xosé
T2 - Revista Latina de Comunicación Social
AB - Introduction: We analyze the presence of newspapers on Mastodon, the most popular social platform in the Fediverse and an alternative to X (Twitter) in this ecosystem of decentralized and interoperable networks. Methodology: A subsample of newspapers (n=20) and accounts (n=28) on Mastodon was obtained from a sample (n=38) of digital native and legacy media in Spain. Official and unofficial, bots and non-automated, active and inactive accounts, instances where they are hosted, and links to Mastodon on media websites were identified. We also identified the date the accounts were created to check if they appeared before or after Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, which boosted Mastodon’s popularity. Results: We identified 13 official accounts (10 native and 3 legacy), none on owned instances, and 15 unofficial accounts (9 legacy and 6 native) connected via RSS by Mastodon instances administrators. Legacy media show a higher proportion of active accounts than digital natives. The proportion of automated accounts is high for both categories. A ‘Musk effect’ is observed in accounts creation. Only elDiario.es and El Salto (digital natives) offer links on their websites. El País (legacy) has the oldest account, and El Salto is the one that shows the greatest commitment to Mastodon. Discussion: The analyzed media do not take advantage of the full potential of the technological sovereignty provided by Mastodon. Conclusions: The template used, and the results open up new lines for academic research on a social platform (Mastodon) and an ecosystem (Fediverse) barely explored in the journalistic field.
DA - 2025///
PY - 2025
DO - 10.4185/rlcs-2025-2338
DP - nuevaepoca.revistalatinacs.org
IS - 83
SP - 1
EP - 40
LA - es
SN - 1138-5820
ST - Periodismo y redes sociales alternativas del Fediverso
UR - https://nuevaepoca.revistalatinacs.org/index.php/revista/article/view/2338
Y2 - 2024/09/14/04:06:06
L1 - https://nuevaepoca.revistalatinacs.org/index.php/revista/article/download/2338/5043
KW - Twitter
KW - Mastodon
KW - Fediverso
KW - Elon Musk
KW - descentralización
KW - periodismo
KW - redes sociales alternativas
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - Public sentiment on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict: insights from YouTube, Mastodon, and Google Trends
AU - Mazzeo Rinaldi, Francesco
AU - Miracula, Vincenzo
AU - Picone, Antonio
AU - Occhipinti, Ornella
T2 - Mathematical Population Studies
AB - This research employs a comprehensive methodology to delve into public sentiments surrounding the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, incorporating unconventional data sources—YouTube comments and Mastodon. Departing from the traditional reliance on Twitter, our systematic approach involves keyword-driven content identification, leveraging Google Trends to establish five pivotal keywords. Mastodon searches employed straightforward hashtag strategies, while the intricacies of YouTube required an exclusive focus on official newspaper channels to mitigate polarization risks. Rigorous data cleaning ensued, retaining only English-language texts and eliminating extraneous elements. The resulting dataset was subjected to Sentiment Analysis and Emotion Detection, providing a nuanced understanding of public sentiments across platforms, totaling 253.3 K texts.
DO - 10.1080/08898480.2024.2401339
DP - Taylor and Francis+NEJM
VL - 0
IS - 0
SP - 1
EP - 25
SN - 0889-8480
ST - Public sentiment on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict
UR - https://doi.org/10.1080/08898480.2024.2401339
Y2 - 2024/09/14/04:06:31
KW - 68T50
KW - 91C99
KW - 91D30
KW - Behavioral data
KW - information retrieval
KW - network analysis
KW - NLP techniques
KW - opinion dynamics
ER -
TY - GEN
TI - Safeguarding Decentralized Social Media: LLM Agents for Automating Community Rule Compliance
AU - La Cava, Lucio
AU - Tagarelli, Andrea
AB - Ensuring content compliance with community guidelines is crucial for maintaining healthy online social environments. However, traditional human-based compliance checking struggles with scaling due to the increasing volume of user-generated content and a limited number of moderators. Recent advancements in Natural Language Understanding demonstrated by Large Language Models unlock new opportunities for automated content compliance verification. This work evaluates six AI-agents built on Open-LLMs for automated rule compliance checking in Decentralized Social Networks, a challenging environment due to heterogeneous community scopes and rules. Analyzing over 50,000 posts from hundreds of Mastodon servers, we find that AI-agents effectively detect non-compliant content, grasp linguistic subtleties, and adapt to diverse community contexts. Most agents also show high inter-rater reliability and consistency in score justification and suggestions for compliance. Human-based evaluation with domain experts confirmed the agents' reliability and usefulness, rendering them promising tools for semi-automated or human-in-the-loop content moderation systems.
DA - 2024/09/13/
PY - 2024
DO - 10.48550/arXiv.2409.08963
DP - arXiv.org
PB - arXiv
ST - Safeguarding Decentralized Social Media
UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/2409.08963
Y2 - 2024/09/22/08:47:14
L1 - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2409.08963.pdf
L2 - https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.08963
KW - Computer Science - Computation and Language
KW - Computer Science - Computers and Society
KW - Computer Science - Human-Computer Interaction
KW - Physics - Physics and Society
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - Creating a City for All of Us: The Possible Role of the Fediverse in Archiving Civic Urban Memory
AU - Lister, Pen
T2 - Digital Society
AB - This paper attempts to build a case for adopting the model of the Fediverse to archive digital citizen-generated urban memory. Examining literature from several relevant fields of debate acts as a pragmatic foundation for reasoning to then outline potential core technical functionality for provision of such an archive, using the Mastodon app as an example. This ‘civic urban memory’ archive is considered as open, curated by citizens themselves and owned by them through civic public ownership in a context of technological sovereignty. Reflecting on issues of citizen self curated and moderated memory collection archives, and the potential for opt-in or anonymous archive posting may offer some mechanisms for fair and open curation, moderation and privacy protection in such archives. Conceptual backdrop for a civic urban memory archive is placed in current debates concerning civic technological platforms acting as a digital public good in a context of a techno-social contract for learning, with a co-constructed shared civic urban memory forming part of open incidental lifelong learning in a future learning city.
DA - 2024/10/07/
PY - 2024
DO - 10.1007/s44206-024-00137-8
DP - Springer Link
VL - 3
IS - 3
SP - 53
J2 - DISO
LA - en
SN - 2731-4669
ST - Creating a City for All of Us
UR - https://doi.org/10.1007/s44206-024-00137-8
Y2 - 2024/10/16/09:12:53
L1 - https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs44206-024-00137-8.pdf
KW - Fediverse
KW - Lifelong learning
KW - Civic learning
KW - Learning cities
KW - Smart cities
KW - Urban citizenship
KW - Urban memory
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - Decentralized social networks and the future of free speech online
AU - Huang, Tao
T2 - Computer Law & Security Review
AB - 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 existing pathologies on the centralized platforms and have been viewed by many as the future of the Internet. This article critically and systematically assesses the decentralization project's prospect for communications online. It uses normative theories of free speech to examine whether and how the decentralization design could facilitate users’ freedom of expression online. The analysis shows that both promises and pitfalls exist, highlighting the importance of value-based design in this area. Two most salient issues for the design of the decentralized networks are: how to balance the decentralization ideal with constant needs of centralization on the network, and how to empower users to make them truly capable of exercising their control. The article then uses some design examples, such as the shared blocklist and the opt-in search function, to illustrate the value considerations underlying the design choices. Some tentative proposals for law and policy interventions are offered to better facilitate the design of the new network. Rather than providing clear answers, the article seeks to map the value implications of the design choices, highlight the stakes, and point directions for future research.
DA - 2024/11/01/
PY - 2024
DO - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clsr.2024.106059
DP - ScienceDirect
VL - 55
SP - 106059
J2 - Computer Law & Security Review
SN - 0267-3649
UR - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0267364924001250
Y2 - 2024/10/20/10:25:44
L2 - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0267364924001250#abs0001
KW - Mastodon
KW - Fediverse
KW - Decentralized social networks
KW - Bluesky
KW - Free speech
KW - Value-based design
ER -
TY - CONF
TI - Mastodoner: A Command-line Tool and Python Library for Public Data Collection from Mastodon
AU - Zia, Haris Bin
AU - Castro, Ignacio
AU - Tyson, Gareth
T3 - CIKM '24
AB - This paper introduces Mastodoner, a command-line tool and Python library aimed at simplifying access to public data on Mastodon, a prominent player in the Fediverse --- a decentralized network of interconnected social media platforms. Mastodoner addresses the challenges posed by Mastodon's decentralized nature by providing a unified interface for data collection, instance discovery, and secure data sharing. Through examples and demonstrations, this paper illustrates Mastodoner's capabilities in facilitating researchers' access to and analysis of public Mastodon data, thus advancing research in decentralized social media analytics. The tool and documentation are available at: https://github.com/harisbinzia/mastodoner.
C1 - New York, NY, USA
C3 - Proceedings of the 33rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
DA - 2024/10/21/
PY - 2024
DO - 10.1145/3627673.3679217
DP - ACM Digital Library
SP - 5314
EP - 5317
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
SN - 9798400704369
ST - Mastodoner
UR - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3627673.3679217
Y2 - 2024/10/26/
L1 - https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3627673.3679217
ER -
TY - CONF
TI - Collecting and Analyzing Public Data from Mastodon
AU - Zia, Haris Bin
AU - Castro, Ignacio
AU - Tyson, Gareth
T3 - CIKM '24
AB - Understanding online behaviors, communities, and trends through social media analytics is becoming increasingly important. Recent changes in the accessibility of platforms like Twitter have made Mastodon a valuable alternative for researchers. In this tutorial, we will explore methods for collecting and analyzing public data from Mastodon, a decentralized micro-blogging social network. Participants will learn about the architecture of Mastodon, techniques and best practices for data collection, and various analytical methods to derive insights from the collected data. This session aims to equip researchers with the skills necessary to harness the potential of Mastodon data in computational social science and social data science research.
C1 - New York, NY, USA
C3 - Proceedings of the 33rd ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
DA - 2024/10/21/
PY - 2024
DO - 10.1145/3627673.3679093
DP - ACM Digital Library
SP - 5551
EP - 5553
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
SN - 9798400704369
UR - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3627673.3679093
Y2 - 2024/10/26/
L1 - https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3627673.3679093
ER -
TY - CONF
TI - Fediverse Migrations: A Study of User Account Portability on the Mastodon Social Network
AU - Bin Zia, Haris
AU - He, Jiahui
AU - Castro, Ignacio
AU - Tyson, Gareth
T3 - IMC '24
AB - The advent of regulation, such as the Digital Markets Act, will foster greater interoperability across competing digital platforms. In such regulatory environments, decentralized platforms like Mastodon have pioneered the principles of social data portability. Such platforms are composed of thousands of independent servers, each of which hosts their own social community. To enable transparent interoperability, users can easily migrate their accounts from one server provider to another. In this paper, we examine 8,745 users who switch their server instances in Mastodon. We use this as a case study to examine account portability behavior more broadly. We explore the factors that affect users' decision to switch instances, as well as the impact of switching on their social media engagement and discussion topics. This leads us to build a classifier to show that switching is predictable, with an F1 score of 0.891. We argue that Mastodon serves as an early exemplar of a social media platform that advocates account interoperability and portability. We hope that this study can bring unique insights to a wider and open digital world in the future.
C1 - New York, NY, USA
C3 - Proceedings of the 2024 ACM on Internet Measurement Conference
DA - 2024/11/04/
PY - 2024
DO - 10.1145/3646547.3689027
DP - ACM Digital Library
SP - 68
EP - 75
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
SN - 9798400705922
ST - Fediverse Migrations
UR - https://doi.org/10.1145/3646547.3689027
Y2 - 2024/11/02/
ER -
TY - GEN
TI - Introducing Argyle: An Open-Source Social Media Lab Built on Mastodon
AU - Small-Schulz, William
DA - 2024/11//
PY - 2024
LA - English
UR - https://willschulz.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/Argyle_Working_Paper_241107.pdf
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - Stichwort: Fediverse
AU - Struckmeyer, Kati
T2 - merz | medien + erziehung
AB - Fediverse, zusammengesetzt aus Federation und Universe, steht für ein Universum unabhängiger dezentraler Dienste, die sich in einer Föderation zusammengetan haben, um Inhalte untereinander auszutauschen. Fediverse ist somit ein dezentrales, offenes Soziales Netzwerk, das aus zahlreichen unterschiedlichen Plattformen und Diensten (genannt Instanzen) besteht. Es vereint nicht nur Alternativen zu den großen zentralen Netzwerken wie Facebook und Twitter, sondern setzt dabei auch auf quelloffene Software und freie Lizenzen. Das Netzwerk gibt es bereits seit 2008, zehn Jahre später rückte es mit der Einführung von Mastodon ins Rampenlicht – und erlebt seit der Twitter-Übernahme durch Elon Musk einen enormen Aufschwung. Allen, denen die maximale Kontrolle über eine gesamte Plattform, die dem zentralisierten Ansatz von Twitter oder Instagram inne liegt, nicht (mehr) sympathisch ist, bietet Fediverse mit seinem dezentralen Ansatz eine echte Alternative. Nutzer*innen haben die Möglichkeit, einfach teilzunehmen, oder auch eine eigene Instanz zu betreiben bzw. durch einen Host betreiben zu lassen. Da jede Instanz ihre eigenen Regeln aufstellen darf, ist eine zentrale Kontrolle der Inhalte bzw. zentrale Beeinflussung des Algorithmus nicht möglich. Somit wird Nutzenden keine undurchsichtige, gesteuerte Anordnung von Beiträgen präsentiert, sondern eine echte, und somit maximal transparente Zeitleiste. Da die Konten nicht zentral verwaltet werden, sind auch Datenklau bzw. Hackerangriffe schwierig.
Auch, wenn die vielen Möglichkeiten im Fediverse anfangs etwas überfordernd wirken; vielleicht ermöglichen sie uns neue Perspektiven und Impulse, die uns konventionelle Soziale Medien mit ihrer Struktur nicht (mehr) bieten können.
DA - 2023/05/17/
PY - 2023
DO - 10.21240/merz/2023.3.3
DP - www.merz-zeitschrift.de
VL - 67
IS - 3
SP - 4
EP - 4
LA - de
SN - 0176-4918
ST - Stichwort
UR - https://www.merz-zeitschrift.de/article/view/2407
Y2 - 2024/12/03/19:00:22
L1 - https://www.merz-zeitschrift.de/article/download/2407/2244
KW - Open Journal Systems
KW - OJS
KW - Stichwort: Fediverse
ER -
TY - CONF
TI - Comment marche le fedivers ?
AU - Bortzmeyer, Stéphane
AB - The "fediverse" (portmanteau word, from "federation" and "universe") is the set of decentralized social networks, managed independently, but exchanging messages. The last two years, it gathered a lot of interest, and many programs now connect to the fediverse (Mastodon, Pleroma, PeerTube, FunkWhale, WriteFreely, PixelFed, Mobilizon...) The decentralized social networks are a hot topic currently, specially giving the bad practices of the GAFA. Because of censorship and mishandling of personal data, a lot of people are looking for alternatives.
How does the fediverse work? One can often read "all these programs talk the ActivityPub protocol". But ActivityPub is actually only a part of what you need to "talk fediverse". There are other protocols. Some are very generic (ActivityPub), some are underspecified (authentication on the fediverse). In its current state, the fediverse is not well documented and good explanations are scarce. Many developers had to read the source code of the other programs to understand what they were supposed to do. We will therefore explain how the fediverse work, under the nice Web interfaces. We'll talk about ActivityPub, but also about the ActivityStreams format, the Webfinger protocol, the idea of "linked data", the JSON-LD format, the HTTP signatures, and everything you need to "talk fediverse".
This talk will be technical, although the social aspects of the fediverse are also raising a lot of issues.
C1 - Dijon, France
C3 - JRES (Journées réseaux de l'enseignement et de la recherche ) 2019
DA - 2019/12//
PY - 2019
DP - HAL Archives Ouvertes
PB - Renater
UR - https://hal.science/hal-04807222
Y2 - 2024/12/11/05:33:10
L1 - https://hal.science/hal-04807222v1/file/author_paper9_article_rev4949_20191011_173651.pdf
KW - mastodon
KW - activitypub
KW - fedivers
KW - peertube
KW - pleroma
ER -
TY - GEN
TI - Building a Mastodon Compatible Java Server for ActivityPub
AU - Nian, Sean
AU - Huang, Angela
AU - Reed, Ben
AB - 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 ActivityPub protocol to communicate over the Fediverse. In this paper, we deconstruct the core protocols used to build the distributed servers of the Fediverse. We explore Mastodon's complex implementation of ActivityPub and created our own Mastodon instance using Java Spring Boot and ActivityPub to interoperate with Mastodon servers.
DA - 2024/12/12/
PY - 2024
DO - 10.48550/arXiv.2412.09011
DP - arXiv.org
PB - arXiv
UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.09011
Y2 - 2024/12/15/05:12:56
L1 - http://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.09011v1
L2 - https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.09011
KW - Computer Science - Social and Information Networks
ER -
TY - CHAP
TI - Wenn aus Mastodon der #Mastdarm wird. Morphologische Wortspiele und ihr ideologisch motiviertes Positionierungspotential
AU - Michel, Sascha
T2 - Diskursmorphologie: Ansätze und Fallstudien zur Schnittstelle zwischen Morphologie und Diskurslinguistik
A2 - Michel, Sascha
DA - 2024/12/30/
PY - 2024
DP - www.degruyter.com
SP - 291
EP - 320
LA - de
PB - De Gruyter
SN - 978-3-11-136393-6
UR - https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111363936-011/html
Y2 - 2024/12/20/04:38:14
L1 - https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111363936-011/pdf?licenseType=open-access
ER -
TY - CHAP
TI - PeerTube native client: A comprehensive study on enhancing user experience in decentralized video sharing
AU - Swetha, M. D.
AU - Hegde, Arun
AU - Kirthi, M. V.
AU - Manuvardhan, V.
AU - Rajashree, S.
AU - Priya, S.
T2 - Computer Science Engineering
AB - The goal for the PeerTube Native Client focuses on creating a native client for Peer-Tube, designed for optimal performance and user experience on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Leveraging the PeerTube API, the client aims to enhance accessibility with features like seamless video playback, subscription management, and user interaction along with additional features like Web PaymentRequest API, and other social features. Emphasizing cross-platform compatibility and native integration, the client prioritizes security and privacy. Following open-source principles, the development process involves iterative refinement. The aim is to boost platform accessibility, offering a user-friendly alternative to web interfaces and contributing to the decentralized and user-centric vision of online video sharing.
DA - 2025///
PY - 2025
PB - CRC Press
SN - 978-1-00-356502-4
ST - PeerTube native client
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - Closing the Door to Remain Open: The Politics of Openness and the Practices of Strategic Closure in the Fediverse
AU - Theophilos, Jamie A.
T2 - Social Media + Society
AB - In early 2023, Meta announced that its new microblogging platform, Threads, would join the Fediverse, a network of free, open-source social media platforms. This decision created a rift within the Fediverse, with some users supporting Meta’s integration while others strongly opposing it. This research explores the practices and discourses of the latter group—users, developers, and server administrators—who aim to build a safer and more autonomous “free Fediverse.” By framing the Free Fediverse as a digital counterpublic, this article introduces the concept of “strategic closure” to illustrate how these actors resist corporate capture and maintain a safer online environment. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of sociomateriality and the politics of openness, my analysis highlights the entanglement between discursive and material aspects of these counterpublic practices. This study contributes to the broader discourse on alternative social media politics, emphasizing the ongoing negotiations between openness, safety, and technological design, and offers insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS) for understanding counterpublics in the age of Big Tech.
DA - 2024/10/01/
PY - 2024
DO - 10.1177/20563051241308323
DP - SAGE Journals
VL - 10
IS - 4
SP - 20563051241308323
LA - en
SN - 2056-3051
ST - Closing the Door to Remain Open
UR - https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051241308323
Y2 - 2024/12/25/18:37:21
L1 - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/20563051241308323
ER -
TY - GEN
TI - A Herd of Young Mastodonts: the User-Centered Footprints of Newcomers After Twitter Acquisition
AU - Cursi, Francesco Di
AU - Boldrini, Chiara
AU - Passarella, Andrea
AU - Conti, Marco
AB - 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' data by platform owners questions their trustworthiness as open interaction tools. These trends and, notably, the recent drastic change in X (formerly Twitter) policies and data accessibility through public APIs, have fuelled significant migration of users towards Fediverse platforms (primarily Mastodon). In this work, we provide an initial analysis of the microscopic properties of Mastodon users' social structures. Specifically, according to the Ego network model, we analyse interaction patterns between a large set of users (egos) and the other users they interact with (alters) to characterise the properties of those users' ego networks. As was observed previously in other OSNs, we found a quite regular structure compatible with the reference Dunbar's Ego Network model. Quite interestingly, our results show clear signs of ego network formation during the initial diffusion of a social networking tool, coherent with the recent surge of Mastodon activity. Therefore, our analysis motivates the use of Mastodon as an open "big data microscope" to characterise human social behaviour, making it a prime candidate to replace those OSN platforms that, unfortunately, cannot be used anymore for this purpose.
DA - 2024/12/20/
PY - 2024
DO - 10.48550/arXiv.2412.16383
DP - arXiv.org
PB - arXiv
ST - A Herd of Young Mastodonts
UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.16383
Y2 - 2024/12/27/07:50:45
L1 - http://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.16383v1
L2 - https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.16383
KW - Computer Science - Social and Information Networks
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - Content creators at a crossroads between decentralized and centralized social media
AU - Khobzi, Hamid
AU - Canhoto, Ana Isabel
AU - Ramezani, Mohammad Sadegh
T2 - Business Horizons
DA - 2024/04//
PY - 2024
DO - 10.1016/j.bushor.2024.04.010
DP - DOI.org (Crossref)
SP - S0007681324000557
J2 - Business Horizons
LA - en
SN - 00076813
UR - https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0007681324000557
Y2 - 2025/01/09/05:16:07
L1 - https://figshare.com/articles/journal_contribution/Content_creators_at_a_crossroads_with_decentralized_social_media/25571964/1/files/46030470.pdf
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - We hardly knew ye... goodbye, #dermtwitter?
AU - Kennedy, Jake
AU - Hutchinson, Katie
AU - Zheng, David X
AU - Guckian, Jonathan
T2 - Dermatology Online Journal
DA - 2023/11/03/
PY - 2023
DO - 10.5070/D329562422
DP - DOI.org (Crossref)
VL - 29
IS - 5
J2 - DOJ
SN - 1087-2108
UR - https://escholarship.org/uc/item/10q117sn
Y2 - 2025/01/09/05:17:40
L1 - https://escholarship.org/content/qt10q117sn/qt10q117sn.pdf?t=s3jkhg
ER -
TY - BOOK
TI - User Migration across Multiple Social Media Platforms
A3 - Shekhar, Shashi
A3 - Papalexakis, Vagelis
A3 - Gao, Jing
A3 - Jiang, Zhe
A3 - Riondato, Matteo
CY - Philadelphia, PA
DA - 2024/01//
PY - 2024
DP - DOI.org (Crossref)
LA - en
PB - Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
SN - 978-1-61197-803-2
UR - https://epubs.siam.org/doi/book/10.1137/1.9781611978032
Y2 - 2025/01/09/05:18:03
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - The Interactive Web—Leaving Twitter
AU - Swogger, Susan E.
T2 - Journal of Electronic Resources in Medical Libraries
DA - 2023/01/02/
PY - 2023
DO - 10.1080/15424065.2023.2176962
DP - DOI.org (Crossref)
VL - 20
IS - 1
SP - 28
EP - 32
J2 - Journal of Electronic Resources in Medical Libraries
LA - en
SN - 1542-4065, 1542-4073
UR - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15424065.2023.2176962
Y2 - 2025/01/09/05:18:45
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - Sustainable use of a smartphone and regulatory needs
AU - Kögler, Martin
AU - Paulick, Katharina
AU - Scheffran, Jürgen
AU - Birkholz, Mario
T2 - Sustainable Development
AB - Abstract
The significance of information and communication technologies (ICT) for the Paris Climate Agreement is continuously increasing because of its growing energy consumption. Here we examine the question for the smartphone and extend the investigation to more aspects of sustainability. Critical issues are identified for ten UN Sustainable Development Goals. Measurements of smartphone energy consumption show that a significant savings potential can be unlocked by reducing the data outflow and the large amount of personal data stored in data centers. Main discrepancies are also traced to the oligopolistic market structure of operating systems (OSs), messenger services, and social media apps. Technical means for a sustainable smartphone use are suggested as alternative OSs, social media channels of the Fediverse, as well as free and open‐source software. Finally, societal conditions are emphasized to make the market for OSs and apps more diverse so that a sustainable smartphone use can generally prevail.
DA - 2024/12//
PY - 2024
DO - 10.1002/sd.2995
DP - DOI.org (Crossref)
VL - 32
IS - 6
SP - 6182
EP - 6200
J2 - Sustainable Development
LA - en
SN - 0968-0802, 1099-1719
UR - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sd.2995
Y2 - 2025/01/09/05:18:53
L1 - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1002/sd.2995
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - Decentralised content moderation
AU - Friedl, Paul
AU - Morgan, Julian
T2 - Internet Policy Review
DA - 2024/04/04/
PY - 2024
DO - 10.14763/2024.2.1754
DP - DOI.org (Crossref)
VL - 13
IS - 2
LA - en
SN - 2197-6775
UR - https://policyreview.info/glossary/decentralised-content-moderation
Y2 - 2025/01/09/05:19:55
L1 - https://policyreview.info/pdf/policyreview-2024-2-1752.pdf
ER -
TY - CONF
TI - MstdnDeck: an agent-based protection of cyber-bullying on distributedly managed linked microbloggings
AU - Oishi, Sho
AU - Fukuta, Naoki
T2 - WI '17: International Conference on Web Intelligence 2017
C1 - Leipzig Germany
C3 - Proceedings of the International Conference on Web Intelligence
DA - 2017/08/23/
PY - 2017
DO - 10.1145/3106426.3109415
DP - DOI.org (Crossref)
SP - 1195
EP - 1198
LA - en
PB - ACM
SN - 978-1-4503-4951-2
ST - MstdnDeck
UR - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3106426.3109415
Y2 - 2025/01/09/05:20:03
ER -
TY - CONF
TI - Toxicity in the Decentralized Web and the Potential for Model Sharing
AU - Bin Zia, Haris
AU - Raman, Aravindh
AU - Castro, Ignacio
AU - Hassan Anaobi, Ishaku
AU - De Cristofaro, Emiliano
AU - Sastry, Nishanth
AU - Tyson, Gareth
T2 - SIGMETRICS/PERFORMANCE '22: ACM SIGMETRICS/IFIP PERFORMANCE Joint International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems
C1 - Mumbai India
C3 - Abstract Proceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGMETRICS/IFIP PERFORMANCE Joint International Conference on Measurement and Modeling of Computer Systems
DA - 2022/06/06/
PY - 2022
DO - 10.1145/3489048.3530968
DP - DOI.org (Crossref)
SP - 15
EP - 16
LA - en
PB - ACM
SN - 978-1-4503-9141-2
UR - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3489048.3530968
Y2 - 2025/01/09/05:20:09
L1 - https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/bitstream/123456789/78627/2/Tyson%20Toxicity%20in%20the%20Decentralized%202022%20Published.pdf
ER -
TY - CHAP
TI - Decentralized Networks vs The Trolls
AU - Caelin, Derek
T2 - Fundamental Challenges to Global Peace and Security
A2 - Mahmoudi, Hoda
A2 - Allen, Michael H.
A2 - Seaman, Kate
CY - Cham
DA - 2022///
PY - 2022
DP - DOI.org (Crossref)
SP - 143
EP - 168
LA - en
PB - Springer International Publishing
SN - 978-3-030-79071-4 978-3-030-79072-1
UR - https://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-3-030-79072-1_8
Y2 - 2025/01/09/05:20:20
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - Beyond Corporate Social Media Platforms: The Epistemic Promises and Perils of Alternative Social Media
AU - Frost-Arnold, Karen
T2 - Topoi
AB - In recent years, we have witnessed increased interest in alternatives to the dominant corporate social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter (now X), and TikTok. Tired of disinformation, harassment, privacy violations, and the general degradation of platforms, users and technologists have looked for non-corporate alternatives. Not-for-profit social media platforms emerging from free/libre and open-source software (FLOSS) communities based on non-centralized infrastructure have emerged as promising alternatives. For applied epistemology of the internet, these alternative social media platforms present an opportunity to study different ways of producing knowledge together online. This paper evaluates the epistemic potential for such alternative, non-corporate social media. I present an epistemological framework for analyzing the epistemic promises and perils of alternative social media. Then I apply this framework to the case of Mastodon, a federated, open-source microblogging platform. Mastodon’s structure and culture of openness present opportunities to avoid many of the epistemic perils of biased and untrustworthy large corporate platforms. However, Mastodon’s risks include techno-elitism, white ignorance, and isolated, epistemically toxic communities.
DA - 2024/12/01/
PY - 2024
DO - 10.1007/s11245-024-10102-2
DP - Springer Link
VL - 43
IS - 5
SP - 1557
EP - 1568
J2 - Topoi
LA - en
SN - 1572-8749
ST - Beyond Corporate Social Media Platforms
UR - https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-024-10102-2
Y2 - 2025/01/09/05:44:16
L1 - https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs11245-024-10102-2.pdf
KW - Mastodon
KW - Moderation
KW - Social media
KW - Alternative social media
KW - Corporate social media
KW - Epistemic injustice
KW - Federation
KW - Ignorance
KW - Objectivity
KW - Ontological expansiveness
KW - Open-source
KW - Promises and perils
KW - Social epistemology
KW - Veritism
KW - Virtue epistemology
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - #PathMastodon: An Up-In-Coming Platform for Pathology Education Among Pathologists, Trainees, and Medical Students
AU - Schukow, Casey
AU - Punjabi, Lavisha S.
AU - Gardner, Jerad M.
T2 - Advances in Anatomic Pathology
AB - Social media use in pathology has continued to grow and become more mainstream among pathologists, trainees, and medical students over the past decade. Twitter has historically been (and still seems to be) a positive platform for the social media pathology community to engage with each other virtually (ie, PathTwitter). However, as a new era of Twitter leadership began to unfold in October 2022, a young platform called “Mastodon” began to gain notice within this community as the hashtag #PathMastodon became prevalent. Founded in 2016 by Eugen Rochko, Mastodon is a decentralized, open-sourced, ads-free platform intended to promote public knowledge in a safe and public manner. When compared with Twitter, however, Mastodon is globally much smaller, and its medical professional server called “Med-Mastodon” is more cumbersome with certain features (eg, tracking analytics and username changes). Nevertheless, this new platform, which looks and feels much like Twitter, has great potential to provide continued medical education and virtual excellence among the social media pathology community. Thus, the purpose of this review is to provide a relevant synopsis of how Mastodon, Med-Mastodon, and #PathMastodon may benefit pathologists, trainees, and medical students who use social media. A qualitative analysis of pertinent peer-reviewed and non–peer-reviewed materials relative to the topic will be performed. In addition, we will provide a comparison of Mastodon and Twitter, provide example figures of #PathMastodon and related posts, and elaborate on the importance this discussion brings to the social media pathology community.
DA - 2024/01//
PY - 2024
DO - 10.1097/PAP.0000000000000405
DP - journals.lww.com
VL - 31
IS - 1
SP - 52
LA - en-US
SN - 1072-4109
ST - #PathMastodon
UR - https://journals.lww.com/anatomicpathology/abstract/2024/01000/_pathmastodon__an_up_in_coming_platform_for.6.aspx
Y2 - 2025/01/09/05:44:23
L2 - https://journals.lww.com/anatomicpathology/abstract/2024/01000/_pathmastodon__an_up_in_coming_platform_for.6.aspx
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - Measuring centralization of online platforms through size and interconnection of communities
AU - Trujillo, Milo Z.
AU - Hébert-Dufresne, Laurent
AU - Bagrow, James
T2 - Online Social Networks and Media
AB - Decentralization of online social platforms offers a variety of potential benefits, including divesting of moderator and administrator authority among a wider population, allowing a variety of communities with differing social standards to coexist, and making the platform more resilient to technical or social attack. However, a platform offering a decentralized architecture does not guarantee that users will use it in a decentralized way, and measuring the centralization of socio-technical networks is not an easy task. In this paper we introduce a method of characterizing inter-community influence, to measure the impact that removing a community would have on the remainder of a platform. Our approach provides a careful definition of “centralization” appropriate in bipartite user-community socio-technical networks, and demonstrates the inadequacy of more trivial methods for interrogating centralization such as examining the distribution of community sizes. We use this method to compare the structure of five socio-technical platforms, and find that even decentralized platforms like Mastodon are far more centralized than any synthetic networks used for comparison. We discuss how this method can be used to identify when a platform is more centralized than it initially appears, either through inherent social pressure like assortative preferential attachment, or through astroturfing by platform administrators, and how this knowledge can inform platform governance and user trust.
DA - 2024/11/01/
PY - 2024
DO - 10.1016/j.osnem.2024.100292
DP - ScienceDirect
VL - 43-44
SP - 100292
J2 - Online Social Networks and Media
SN - 2468-6964
UR - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S246869642400017X
Y2 - 2025/01/09/05:44:41
L1 - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S246869642400017X/pdfft?download=true
L2 - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S246869642400017X
KW - Insularity
KW - Social centralization
KW - Structural influence
ER -
TY - CHAP
TI - Brazilian Activism in Mastodon: Sovereignty Discourses between Cyberlibertarianism and State-Centrism
AU - Tomaz, Tales
T2 - Digital Sovereignty in the BRICS Countries: How the Global South and Emerging Power Alliances Are Reshaping Digital Governance
A2 - Belli, Luca
A2 - Jiang, Min
T3 - Communication, Society and Politics
AB - This chapter explores digital sovereignty claims in Brazilian activism on Mastodon, the most relevant development of federated social media. The free and open source software (FOSS) movement has always advanced digital sovereignty discourses, emphasizing bottom-up struggle for control and autonomy over technology. Federated social media are the open source response to the rise of corporate digital platforms and their proprietary business model. However, most narratives about FOSS struggles, including Mastodon, emerge from the core of the global capitalism. The specific appropriations of digital sovereignty discourses by Mastodon activists in the Global South and, in particular, in the BRICS are still understudied. This is even more relevant because of the history of technological sovereignty in the global periphery, in which bottom-up activism has been much closer to the state than in most FOSS narratives. Drawing on participant observation, interviews, and country data, the chapter contributes a nuanced understanding of how Brazilian activists articulate and shape digital sovereignty discourses. It finds out that Brazilian activism represents a step toward the politicization of the FOSS movement, but still attaches little value to the geopolitical dimension of social media struggles, departing from the historical contribution of FOSS activism in the Global South.
CY - Cambridge
DA - 2025///
PY - 2025
DP - Cambridge University Press
SP - 190
EP - 213
PB - Cambridge University Press
SN - 978-1-00-953113-9
ST - Brazilian Activism in Mastodon
UR - https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/digital-sovereignty-in-the-brics-countries/brazilian-activism-in-mastodon/96B0E421C221C4D0DCEBE241AC71E205
Y2 - 2025/01/12/09:25:41
L1 - https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/96B0E421C221C4D0DCEBE241AC71E205/9781009531139c9_190-213.pdf/brazilian-activism-in-mastodon.pdf
L2 - https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/digital-sovereignty-in-the-brics-countries/brazilian-activism-in-mastodon/96B0E421C221C4D0DCEBE241AC71E205
KW - social media
KW - Mastodon
KW - Brazil
KW - digital sovereignty
KW - free and open source software
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - Fixing Social Media: Toward a Democratic Digital Commons
AU - Kwet, Michael
T2 - Markets, Globalization & Development Review
DA - 2020/09/29/
PY - 2020
DO - 10.23860/MGDR-2020-05-01-04
DP - COinS
VL - 5
IS - 1
SN - 2473-4055
ST - Fixing Social Media
UR - https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/mgdr/vol5/iss1/4
L1 - https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1132&context=mgdr
L2 - https://digitalcommons.uri.edu/mgdr/vol5/iss1/4/
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - GROUPS ARE EASY, FEDERATING IS HARD
AU - Brown, James J.
T2 - AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research
AB - When Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, many users sought a place of refuge, and Mastodon was seen as an early candidate. Mastodon is part of the Fediverse, a decentralized network of social media services. But people arriving in this network were confused, a problem that many chalked up to a clunky interface and a confusing user experience. Such a reading of the situation misses something much more fundamental. This reaction to Mastodon signals something important about a narrowed network imagination amongst some users, a narrowed imagination that is not shared by all. On Mastodon, users engage in labor-intensive federating practices – they manage both the internal dynamics of their home server and that server’s relations to other servers. Groups are relatively easy to create, but federation can be quite difficult. Federation faces a number of obstacles, but some groups, including far-right political activists, have effectively responded to those obstacles. Researchers should study not only federated social media but also the federating practices used by groups both online and offline, practices that move past the easy labor of group formation into the more difficult work of federation.
DA - 2023/12/31/
PY - 2023
DO - 10.5210/spir.v2023i0.13403
DP - spir.aoir.org
LA - en
SN - 2162-3317
UR - https://spir.aoir.org/ojs/index.php/spir/article/view/13403
Y2 - 2025/01/14/04:56:39
L1 - https://spir.aoir.org/ojs/index.php/spir/article/download/13403/11517
KW - mastodon
KW - fediverse
KW - federation
KW - networks
KW - practices
ER -
TY - CONF
TI - Mapping the Design Space of Teachable Social Media Feed Experiences
AU - Feng, K. J. Kevin
AU - Koo, Xander
AU - Tan, Lawrence
AU - Bruckman, Amy
AU - McDonald, David W.
AU - Zhang, Amy X.
T3 - CHI '24
AB - 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. Drawing on the paradigm of interactive machine teaching (IMT), an interaction framework for non-expert algorithmic adaptation, we map out a design space for teachable social media feed experiences to empower agential, personalized feed curation. To do so, we conducted a think-aloud study (N = 24) featuring four social media platforms—Instagram, Mastodon, TikTok, and Twitter—to understand key signals users leveraged to determine the value of a post in their feed. We synthesized users’ signals into taxonomies that, when combined with user interviews, inform five design principles that extend IMT into the social media setting. We finally embodied our principles into three feed designs that we present as sensitizing concepts for teachable feed experiences moving forward.
C1 - New York, NY, USA
C3 - Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
DA - 2024/05/11/
PY - 2024
DO - 10.1145/3613904.3642120
DP - ACM Digital Library
SP - 1
EP - 20
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
SN - 9798400703300
UR - https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3642120
Y2 - 2025/01/13/
L1 - https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3613904.3642120
ER -
TY - BOOK
TI - Der Kampf um das Internet: Wie Wikipedia, Mastodon und Co. die Tech-Giganten herausfordern
AU - Mey, Stefan
AB - Mehr Freiheit und mehr Demokratie waren die großen Versprechen des Internets. Doch inzwischen konzentriert sich die Macht bei einigen wenigen Tech-Giganten. Dabei bietet das Netz selbst eine Lösung, um sein ursprüngliches Freiheitsversprechen zu bewahren: die nichtkommerzielle digitale Gegenwelt. Zu ihr zählen etwa die Online-Enzyklopädie Wikipedia, die Twitter-Alternative Mastodon, der Browser Firefox oder der Messenger Signal. Es liegt an uns, wie stark wir die digitalen Herausforderer machen. In aufwendig recherchierten, so informativ wie unterhaltsam geschriebenen Porträts stellt Stefan Mey die Protagonist*innen, Ziele, Strategien und Geschäftsmodelle der digitalen Gegenwelt vor. Von ihnen gibt es weitaus mehr, als wir gewöhnlich denken. Sie sind die digitalen Gegenstücke von Greenpeace, Attac oder Amnesty International und formen die digitale Zivilgesellschaft. Um das Internet besser, fairer und freier zu machen, muss man nicht Informatik studieren, kein Start-up gründen und auch kein Hacker sein. Ist das der Beginn einer kleinen Revolution?
DA - 2023/10/12/
PY - 2023
DP - Google Books
SP - 240
LA - de
PB - C.H.Beck
SN - 978-3-406-80723-7
ST - Der Kampf um das Internet
L2 - https://books.google.es/books?id=lIjVEAAAQBAJ
KW - Political Science / Political Economy
KW - Social Science / Media Studies
ER -
TY - CHAP
TI - A Topic Trend on P2P Based Social Media
AU - Kohana, Masaki
AU - Sakaji, Hiroki
AU - Kobayashi, Akio
AU - Okamoto, Shusuke
T2 - Advances in Network-Based Information Systems
A2 - Barolli, Leonard
A2 - Enokido, Tomoya
A2 - Takizawa, Makoto
CY - Cham
DA - 2018///
PY - 2018
DP - DOI.org (Crossref)
VL - 7
SP - 1136
EP - 1143
PB - Springer International Publishing
SN - 978-3-319-65520-8 978-3-319-65521-5
UR - http://link.springer.com/10.1007/978-3-319-65521-5_105
Y2 - 2025/01/15/03:35:24
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - Neo-Gnosticism and the American Dissident Right
AU - Versluis, Arthur
T2 - Journal for the Study of Radicalism
DA - 2023/01/01/
PY - 2023
DO - 10.14321/jstudradi.17.1.0159
DP - DOI.org (Crossref)
VL - 17
IS - 1
SP - 159
EP - 189
LA - en
SN - 1930-1189, 1930-1197
UR - https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/jsr/article/17/1/159/351733/Neo-Gnosticism-and-the-American-Dissident-Right
Y2 - 2025/01/15/03:35:30
ER -
TY - GEN
TI - Reputation Transfer in the Twitter Diaspora
AU - Radivojevic, Kristina
AU - Adams, D. J.
AU - Laszlo, Griffin
AU - Kery, Felixander
AU - Weninger, Tim
AB - 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 X/Twitter to emerging alternatives such as Threads, Mastodon, and Truth Social. Leveraging a large dataset from X/Twitter, we investigate the extent of user departure from X/Twitter and the destinations they migrate to. Additionally, we examine whether a user's reputation on one platform correlates with their reputation on another, shedding light on the transferability of digital reputation across social media ecosystems. Overall, we find that users with a large following on X/Twitter are more likely to migrate to another platform; and that their reputation on X/Twitter is highly correlated with reputations on Threads, but not Mastodon or Truth Social.
DA - 2024/05/20/
PY - 2024
DO - 10.48550/arXiv.2405.12040
DP - arXiv.org
PB - arXiv
UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/2405.12040
Y2 - 2025/01/15/03:35:42
L1 - http://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.12040v1
L2 - https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.12040
KW - Computer Science - Social and Information Networks
KW - Computer Science - Human-Computer Interaction
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - Should we stay or should we go—The ever‐growing role of Twitter (X) in neuroscience dissemination and a quandary of conscience for a field
AU - Foxe, Kenneth A.
AU - Foxe, John J.
T2 - European Journal of Neuroscience
DA - 2024/02//
PY - 2024
DO - 10.1111/ejn.16236
DP - DOI.org (Crossref)
VL - 59
IS - 3
SP - 319
EP - 322
J2 - Eur J of Neuroscience
LA - en
SN - 0953-816X, 1460-9568
UR - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ejn.16236
Y2 - 2025/01/15/03:35:47
L1 - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/ejn.16236
ER -
TY - GEN
TI - Social Media Bot Policies: Evaluating Passive and Active Enforcement
AU - Radivojevic, Kristina
AU - McAleer, Christopher
AU - Conley, Catrell
AU - Kennedy, Cormac
AU - Brenner, Paul
AB - The emergence of Multimodal Foundation Models (MFMs) holds significant promise for transforming social media platforms. However, this advancement also introduces substantial security and ethical concerns, as it may facilitate malicious actors in the exploitation of online users. We aim to evaluate the strength of security protocols on prominent social media platforms in mitigating the deployment of MFM bots. We examined the bot and content policies of eight popular social media platforms: X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, Facebook, Threads, TikTok, Mastodon, Reddit, and LinkedIn. Using Selenium, we developed a web bot to test bot deployment and AI-generated content policies and their enforcement mechanisms. Our findings indicate significant vulnerabilities within the current enforcement mechanisms of these platforms. Despite having explicit policies against bot activity, all platforms failed to detect and prevent the operation of our MFM bots. This finding reveals a critical gap in the security measures employed by these social media platforms, underscoring the potential for malicious actors to exploit these weaknesses to disseminate misinformation, commit fraud, or manipulate users.
DA - 2024///
PY - 2024
DO - 10.48550/ARXIV.2409.18931
DP - DOI.org (Datacite)
PB - arXiv
ST - Social Media Bot Policies
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.18931
Y2 - 2025/01/15/03:35:52
KW - Computers and Society (cs.CY)
KW - FOS: Computer and information sciences
KW - Social and Information Networks (cs.SI)
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - Social Media Socialism: People’s Tech and Decolonization for a Global Society in Crisis
AU - Kwet, Michael
T2 - SSRN Electronic Journal
DA - 2020///
PY - 2020
DO - 10.2139/ssrn.3695356
DP - DOI.org (Crossref)
J2 - SSRN Journal
LA - en
SN - 1556-5068
ST - Social Media Socialism
UR - https://www.ssrn.com/abstract=3695356
Y2 - 2025/01/15/03:35:57
ER -
TY - CONF
TI - Minimizing Social Data Overload through Interest-Based Stream Filtering in a P2P Social Network
AU - Nagulendra, Sayooran
AU - Vassileva, Julita
T2 - 2013 International Conference on Social Computing (SocialCom)
C1 - Alexandria, VA, USA
C3 - 2013 International Conference on Social Computing
DA - 2013/09//
PY - 2013
DO - 10.1109/SocialCom.2013.133
DP - DOI.org (Crossref)
SP - 878
EP - 881
PB - IEEE
SN - 978-0-7695-5137-1
UR - http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6693430/
Y2 - 2025/01/15/03:36:03
ER -
TY - GEN
TI - SocioHub: An Interactive Tool for Cross-Platform Social Media Data Collection
AU - Nirmal, Ayushi
AU - Jiang, Bohan
AU - Liu, Huan
AB - 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. Analyzing cross-platform user behavior can provide insights into the preferences and expectations of users on each platform. By understanding how users behave and interact across platforms, we can build an understanding of content consumption patterns, enhance communication and social interactions, and tailor platform-specific strategies. We can further gather insights into how users navigate and engage with their platforms on different devices. In this work, we develop a tool SocioHub, which enables users to gather data on multiple social media platforms in one place. This tool can help researchers gain insights into different data attributes for users across social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Mastodon. Keywords: Social Media Platforms, Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon.
DA - 2023///
PY - 2023
DO - 10.48550/ARXIV.2309.06525
DP - DOI.org (Datacite)
PB - arXiv
ST - SocioHub
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.06525
Y2 - 2025/01/15/03:36:08
KW - FOS: Computer and information sciences
KW - Social and Information Networks (cs.SI)
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - Stichwort: Fediverse
AU - Struckmeyer, Kati
T2 - merz | medien + erziehung
AB - Fediverse, zusammengesetzt aus Federation und Universe, steht für ein Universum unabhängiger dezentraler Dienste, die sich in einer Föderation zusammengetan haben, um Inhalte untereinander auszutauschen. Fediverse ist somit ein dezentrales, offenes Soziales Netzwerk, das aus zahlreichen unterschiedlichen Plattformen und Diensten (genannt Instanzen) besteht. Es vereint nicht nur Alternativen zu den großen zentralen Netzwerken wie Facebook und Twitter, sondern setzt dabei auch auf quelloffene Software und freie Lizenzen. Das Netzwerk gibt es bereits seit 2008, zehn Jahre später rückte es mit der Einführung von Mastodon ins Rampenlicht – und erlebt seit der Twitter-Übernahme durch Elon Musk einen enormen Aufschwung. Allen, denen die maximale Kontrolle über eine gesamte Plattform, die dem zentralisierten Ansatz von Twitter oder Instagram inne liegt, nicht (mehr) sympathisch ist, bietet Fediverse mit seinem dezentralen Ansatz eine echte Alternative. Nutzer*innen haben die Möglichkeit, einfach teilzunehmen, oder auch eine eigene Instanz zu betreiben bzw. durch einen Host betreiben zu lassen. Da jede Instanz ihre eigenen Regeln aufstellen darf, ist eine zentrale Kontrolle der Inhalte bzw. zentrale Beeinflussung des Algorithmus nicht möglich. Somit wird Nutzenden keine undurchsichtige, gesteuerte Anordnung von Beiträgen präsentiert, sondern eine echte, und somit maximal transparente Zeitleiste. Da die Konten nicht zentral verwaltet werden, sind auch Datenklau bzw. Hackerangriffe schwierig.
Auch, wenn die vielen Möglichkeiten im Fediverse anfangs etwas überfordernd wirken; vielleicht ermöglichen sie uns neue Perspektiven und Impulse, die uns konventionelle Soziale Medien mit ihrer Struktur nicht (mehr) bieten können.
DA - 2023/05/17/
PY - 2023
DO - 10.21240/merz/2023.3.3
DP - DOI.org (Crossref)
VL - 67
IS - 3
SP - 4
J2 - merz
SN - 0176-4918, 0176-4918
ST - Stichwort
UR - https://www.merz-zeitschrift.de/article/view/2407
Y2 - 2025/01/15/03:36:14
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - Recommending Users: Whom to Follow on Federated Social Networks
AU - Trienes, J.
AU - Cano, A.
AU - Hiemstra, D.
T2 - http://dir2018.nl/download_file/view/39/184
AB - DIR2018
DA - 2018///
PY - 2018
DP - repository.ubn.ru.nl
LA - en
ST - Recommending Users
UR - https://repository.ubn.ru.nl/handle/2066/226175
Y2 - 2025/01/15/03:36:23
L1 - https://repository.ubn.ru.nl/bitstream/2066/226175/1/226175.pdf
ER -
TY - GEN
TI - The Failed Migration of Academic Twitter
AU - Wang, Xinyu
AU - Koneru, Sai
AU - Rajtmajer, Sarah
AB - Following changes in Twitter's ownership 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 looks at the dynamics of this migration. Utilizing publicly available user account data, we track the posting activity of academics on Mastodon over a one year period. We also gathered follower-followee relationships to map internal networks, finding that the subset of academics who engaged in migration were well-connected. However, this strong internal connectivity was insufficient to prevent users from returning to Twitter/X. Our analyses reveal significant challenges sustaining user engagement on Mastodon due to its decentralized structure as well as competition from other platforms such as Bluesky and Threads. The movement lost momentum after an initial surge of enthusiasm where the main network was fully established as most users did not maintain their activity levels, and those who did faced lower levels of engagement. Our findings highlight the challenges involved in transitioning professional communities to decentralized platforms, emphasizing the need for focus on community building for long-term user engagement.
DA - 2024///
PY - 2024
DO - 10.48550/ARXIV.2406.04005
DP - DOI.org (Datacite)
PB - arXiv
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.04005
Y2 - 2025/01/15/03:38:07
KW - FOS: Computer and information sciences
KW - Social and Information Networks (cs.SI)
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - The Promises, Problems, and Possibilities for Alt-Networks
AU - Boyle, Casey
AU - Gehl, Robert
AU - Zulli, Diana
AU - Yang, Misti
AU - Brown, Jim
T2 - AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research
AB - The Promises, Problems, and Possibilities for Alt-Networks Introduction Social media has become a central facet of contemporary life and that centralization has narrowed our perspectives and lessened our possibilities (Pariser, 2011; Vaidhyanathan, 2018). This centralizing of social media networks happens for their individual users, but also at the level of how social media informs our discourses through journalistic practice, government institutions, industry sectors. Because of the role that social media now play, we have become acutely aware of their shortcomings. Their platforms not only host but actively cultivate toxic and abusive environments for many of its users. In addition to their functions of interaction, they also provide avenues for increasing governmental control through surveillance or gatekeeping. Given the lack of adequate response from tech companies to these long standing issues, it was inevitable that something had to happen. In response to these conditions, tech advocates, activists, students, and scholars have launched numerous alternatives to mainstream social networks. These networks rethink what social media can and should do in times of over reliance on monolithic digital platforms. Some networks redesign the user’s experience to lessen or eliminate harassment; some networks focus on data privacy responsibilities; some create spaces where non-centralized networks can persist even against oppressive governmental regimes. Given the rise and differentiation of alt-networks, there is a need to study and examine the proliferation of alt-networks. This panel offers four presentations varied in objects, different in methodological approaches, and diverse in their claims. In examining alt-networks, this panel will explore how these redesigned digital platforms respond to demands of scalability, how political activists develop and deploy alt-networks for protests, how researchers could cultivate a games theory approach to studying alt-networks and, finally, how the lack of certain features in alt-networks may doom their survival. The methods being explored will include critical theory, social science research, methodological discussion, and critical analysis through a rhetorical lens. Ultimately, our panel hopes to join in on emerging conversations about the ecology of networks and contribute valuable insights for internet research. A Network of Alt-Networks These papers have been carefully assembled to represent a substantial spectrum of the promises, problems, and possibilities for Alt-Tech today. In the first presentation, the paper develops a games theory approach to studying alt-networks, in this case, Mastodon instances. This is an important development as mainstream social media networks have benefited from years of research approaches, new networked objects create new networked questions requiring new methodological considerations. Related to this problem, the second presentation examines how and when alt-networks engage or resist the inevitable need to scale their operations. Such a study is important because mainstream social media impose a will to scale in ways that make it seem natural and unstoppable. The third presentation engages activists and how ad hoc alt-networks allow for platforms that avoid and leverage themselves against oppressive regimes. Finally, the fourth presentation will explore why alt-networks have so far failed alt-right political actors. This argument will look at how micro-interactions on platforms inform and drive a dangerous cycle of political antagonism. As a set, these presentations will give AoIR attendees a comprehensive survey of sites, methods, and sources for engaging and analyzing alt-networks. While the papers all draw heavily on critical theory and analysis, each differs in how they approach their objects of analysis. Using technical approaches, social science methods, speculative means, and rhetorical analysis the papers also demonstrate a wide swath of ways to encounter the alt-network. Finally, the sourcing and discourse engaged by each presentation activates multiple academic discussions while also sticking close to shared themes and concerns. The Possibilities of Alt-Networks This panel builds on recent work concerning the disappointment with mainstream social networks but also the promise of alternatives (Gehl, 2015, Tufekci, 2017). The adherence to tech industry’s unfair labor practices, the inability to respond to users’ needs, the lack of clear and consistent privacy responsibilities, the weak submission to governmental control— these concerns with social media have all been written (Noble, 2018; Roberts, 2019). The rise and proliferation of Alt-Networks is an important development for internet researchers because those innovations rekindle the earliest aims of the internet itself. Namely, the construction of a system whose topological configurations resisted centralization and allowed for its users to develop multiple ways of communicating knowledge to one another.
DA - 2021/09/15/
PY - 2021
DO - 10.5210/spir.v2021i0.12090
DP - DOI.org (Crossref)
J2 - SPIR
SN - 2162-3317, 2162-3317
UR - https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/spir/article/view/12090
Y2 - 2025/01/15/03:38:57
L1 - https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/spir/article/download/12090/10503
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - Transparency as an empty signifier? Assessing transparency in EU and platform initiatives on online political advertising and actors
AU - Meyer, Trisha
AU - Vetulani‐Cęgiel, Agnieszka
T2 - Policy & Internet
AB - Abstract
This paper investigates how the European Union (EU) and online platforms operationalise ‘political advertising’ and ‘transparency’ in a context of ongoing political and policy debates on regulating online platforms. We compare ongoing EU policy initiatives (revised Code of Practice on Disinformation and Regulation on the Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising) against platform policies and practices (Google, Mastodon, Meta, Microsoft, Telegram, TikTok, Twitter/X) undertaken to moderate political actors and advertising. We argue that the concept of transparency is used as an ‘empty signifier’: meaningful at the political and declarative level but when translated into practice, leads to diverse results. The paper contributes to academic and policy debates on platform responsibility and political advertising transparency in light of the recent European elections and the future implementation of the Regulation on the Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising.
,
摘要:
本文研究了关于监管网络平台的当前政治辩论和政策辩论情境下，欧盟和网络平台如何对“政治广告”和“透明度”进行操作化。我们将正在进行的欧盟政策举措（修订后的《反虚假信息行为准则》和《政治广告透明度和针对性监管》）与平台政策和实践（谷歌、Mastodon、Meta、微软、Telegram、TikTok、Twitter/X）进行比较，这些政策和实践旨在监督政治行动者和广告。我们论证，透明度的概念被用作“空洞的象征”:在政治和宣言层面上有意义，但在实践中却会产生不同的结果。鉴于近期的欧洲选举和《政治广告透明度和针对性监管》的未来实施，本文为关于“平台责任和政治广告透明度”的学术辩论和政策辩论作贡献。
,
Resumen
Este artículo investiga cómo la UE y las plataformas en línea operacionalizan la “publicidad política” y la “transparencia” en un contexto de debates políticos y de políticas en curso sobre la regulación de las plataformas en línea. Comparamos las iniciativas políticas en curso de la UE (Código revisado de prácticas sobre desinformación y regulación sobre la transparencia y la segmentación de la publicidad política) con las políticas y prácticas de las plataformas (Google, Mastodon, Meta, Microsoft, Telegram, TikTok, Twitter/X) emprendidas para moderar a los actores políticos y la publicidad. Sostenemos que el concepto de transparencia se utiliza como un “significante vacío”: significativo a nivel político y declarativo, pero cuando se traduce a la práctica, conduce a resultados diversos. El artículo contribuye a los debates académicos y de políticas sobre la responsabilidad de las plataformas y la transparencia de la publicidad política a la luz de las recientes elecciones europeas y la futura implementación del Reglamento sobre la transparencia y la segmentación de la publicidad política.
DA - 2024/09/04/
PY - 2024
DO - 10.1002/poi3.417
DP - DOI.org (Crossref)
SP - poi3.417
J2 - Policy & Internet
LA - en
SN - 1944-2866, 1944-2866
ST - Transparency as an empty signifier?
UR - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/poi3.417
Y2 - 2025/01/15/03:41:20
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - Whose Policy? Privacy Challenges of Decentralized Platforms
AU - Hwang, Sohyeon
AU - Nanayakkara, Priyanka
AU - Shvartzshnaider, Yan
T2 - SSRN Electronic Journal
DA - 2023///
PY - 2023
DO - 10.2139/ssrn.4416746
DP - DOI.org (Crossref)
J2 - SSRN Journal
LA - en
SN - 1556-5068
ST - Whose Policy?
UR - https://www.ssrn.com/abstract=4416746
Y2 - 2025/01/15/03:42:08
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - The Revolution Will Not Be Centralized; Decentralized Technologies & the Future of Historical Narratives.
AU - Soltero, Raphael
AB - From Victoria University of Wellington: <strong>The understanding of historical narratives has long been under the dominion of centralized perspectives, often marginalizing diverse viewpoints. In response to this issue, this research investigates whether and how the tenets of decentralization can empower digital spaces to promote inclusive representation and challenge centralized narratives.</strong>Decentralized technologies, employing mechanisms of peer-to-peer interactions, transparency, and community governance, are identified as potential solutions to overcome the representation issues inherent in centralized digital platforms. These platforms have revolutionized information sharing but have, paradoxically, often perpetuated the same biases we seek to eliminate.Drawing from case studies of community-driven platforms like Wikipedia and Mastodon, and decentralized systems like Bitcoin and InterPlanetary File System, this research explores the challenges and successes of implementing decentralization. Key findings indicate that optimal decentralization requires a careful balance of inclusivity, scalability, security, and sustainability, shedding light on the design complexities in decentralized systems.The implications of this research extend beyond academia, providing a roadmap for creating digital spaces that foster empathy and mutual understanding through a diversity of historical narratives. This study posits that the adoption of decentralized technology can champion digital sovereignty, mitigate centralized discourse and agenda, and challenge the status quo of representation in digital spaces.In the face of an increasingly digital society, this research serves as a call to action, urging continuous design innovation to rethink and reconstruct our digital landscapes through the lens of decentralization. The research thus initiates an important discourse on the future of digital spaces, inclusivity, and the representation of historical narratives.
DA - 2023/09/25/T00:00:00Z
PY - 2023
DO - 10.26686/wgtn.24189963
DP - digitalnz.org
LA - en
UR - https://digitalnz.org/records/52524948
Y2 - 2025/01/15/03:42:28
L1 - https://openaccess.wgtn.ac.nz/ndownloader/files/42443976
L2 - https://digitalnz.org/records/52524948
ER -
TY - GEN
TI - Collaborative Content Moderation in the Fediverse
AU - Zia, Haris Bin
AU - Raman, Aravindh
AU - Castro, Ignacio
AU - Tyson, Gareth
AB - 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 created challenges for administrators though. This paper focuses on one particular challenge: content moderation, e.g. the need to remove spam or hate speech. While centralized platforms like Facebook and Twitter rely on automated tools for moderation, their dependence on massive labeled datasets and specialized infrastructure renders them impractical for decentralized, low-resource settings like the Fediverse. In this work, we design and evaluate FedMod, a collaborative content moderation system based on federated learning. Our system enables servers to exchange parameters of partially trained local content moderation models with similar servers, creating a federated model shared among collaborating servers. FedMod demonstrates robust performance on three different content moderation tasks: harmful content detection, bot content detection, and content warning assignment, achieving average per-server macro-F1 scores of 0.71, 0.73, and 0.58, respectively.
DA - 2025/01/10/
PY - 2025
DO - 10.48550/arXiv.2501.05871
DP - arXiv.org
PB - arXiv
UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/2501.05871
Y2 - 2025/01/15/15:38:23
L1 - http://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.05871v1
L2 - https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.05871
KW - Computer Science - Social and Information Networks
KW - Computer Science - Machine Learning
KW - Computer Science - Networking and Internet Architecture
ER -
TY - CONF
TI - Comparing User Activity on X and Mastodon
AU - Hironaka, Shiori
AU - Yoshida, Mitsuo
AU - Shudo, Kazuyuki
T2 - 2024 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData)
AB - 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 activity, as a user selects a server to access the Fediverse and posts are distributed along the structure. This paper reports on the differences in user activity between Twitter and Mastodon, a prominent example of decentralized social media. The target of the analysis is Japanese posts because both Twitter and Mastodon are actively used especially in Japan. Our findings include a larger number of replies on Twitter, more consistent user engagement on mstdn.jp, and different topic preferences on each server.
C3 - 2024 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData)
DA - 2024/12//
PY - 2024
DO - 10.1109/BigData62323.2024.10825212
DP - IEEE Xplore
SP - 2967
EP - 2972
UR - https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10825212
Y2 - 2025/01/19/10:55:45
L1 - https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stampPDF/getPDF.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10825212&ref=
L2 - https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10825212
KW - Fediverse
KW - Media
KW - Big Data
KW - Blogs
KW - Ecosystems
KW - Focusing
KW - Servers
KW - Social media analysis
KW - Social networking (online)
KW - Time-frequency analysis
KW - Topic analysis
KW - User activity
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - From Writing Texts Towards Writing Platforms: A Story of Mastodon
AU - Pickering, Thomas
T2 - Proceedings of the Computers & Writing Conference
DO - https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/proceedings/cw2024/pickering.pdf
DP - Zotero
LA - en
UR - https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/proceedings/cw2024/pickering.pdf
L1 - https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/proceedings/cw2024/pickering.pdf
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - The Centralization of a Decentralized Video Platform - A First Characterization Of PeerTube
AU - Polinski, Michael
AU - Jo, Richard
AU - McAfee, Kevin
AU - Bustamante, Fabián E.
T2 - SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev.
AB - PeerTube is an open-source video sharing platform built as a decentralized alternative to YouTube. With software like Mastodon and Friendica, PeerTube is part of a series of federated social media platforms built partly in response to growing concerns about centralized control and ownership of the incumbent ones. In this paper, we present the first characterization of PeerTube, including its underlying infrastructure and the content being shared on its network. Our findings reveal concerning trends toward centralization that echo patterns observed in other contexts, exacerbated by the limited degree of content replication. PeerTube instances are mostly located in North America and Western Europe, with about 70% hosted in Germany, the USA, and France, and over 50% hosted on the top 7 ***ASes. We also find that over 92% of videos are stored without any redundancy in spite of PeerTube's native support for video redundancy.
DA - 2025/02/11/
PY - 2025
DO - 10.1145/3717512.3717516
DP - ACM Digital Library
VL - 54
IS - 4
SP - 25
EP - 35
SN - 0146-4833
UR - https://doi.org/10.1145/3717512.3717516
Y2 - 2025/02/20/04:15:25
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - Engineering patterns for Trust and Safety on social media platforms: A case study of Mastodon and Diaspora
AU - Cramer, Geoffrey
AU - Maxam III, William P.
AU - Davis, James C.
T2 - Journal of Systems and Software
AB - Context:
Trust & Safety (T&S) Engineering is an emerging area of software engineering that mitigates the risks of harmful interactions in online platforms. Numerous studies have explored T&S risks on social media platforms, taxonomizing threats and investigating individual issues. However, there is limited empirical knowledge about engineering efforts to promote T&S.
Methods:
This study examines T&S risks and the engineering patterns to resolve them. We conducted a case study of the two largest decentralized SMPs: Mastodon and Diaspora. These SMPs are open-source, so we analyzed T&S discussions within 60 GitHub issues. We analyzed T&S discussions that took place in their online repository and extracted T&S risks, T&S engineering patterns, and resolution rationales considered by the engineers. We integrate our findings by mapping T&S engineering patterns onto a general model of SMPs, to give SMP engineers a systematic understanding of their T&S risk treatment options.
Results:
T&S issues are a challenge throughout the feature set and lifespan of an SMP. A taxonomy of 12 solution patterns are developed, paving the way for academia and industry to standardize Trust & Safety solutions. We conclude with future directions to study and improve T&S Engineering, spanning software design, decision-making, and validation. We conclude with future directions to study and improve T&S Engineering, spanning software design, decision-making, and validation.
DA - 2025/04/01/
PY - 2025
DO - 10.1016/j.jss.2024.112322
DP - ScienceDirect
VL - 222
SP - 112322
J2 - Journal of Systems and Software
SN - 0164-1212
ST - Engineering patterns for Trust and Safety on social media platforms
UR - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0164121224003662
Y2 - 2025/02/26/04:28:23
L2 - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0164121224003662?casa_token=qg2xXjSnM2sAAAAA:-MRUq04pGb5KbFdBtHvV4io06Q8C45NBUuYfr_iAZ6NGV7wAoV1WBIdg3CwosGXoMSbdHq5rdQ
KW - Empirical software engineering
KW - Engineering decision-making
KW - Risk
KW - Social media platforms
KW - Trust & Safety engineering
ER -
TY - GEN
TI - FediverseSharing: A Novel Dataset on Cross-Platform Interaction Dynamics between Threads and Mastodon Users
AU - Jeong, Ujun
AU - Beigi, Alimohammad
AU - Tahir, Anique
AU - Tang, Susan Xu
AU - Bernard, H. Russell
AU - Liu, Huan
AB - Traditional social media platforms, once envisioned as digital town squares, face growing criticism over corporate control, content moderation, and privacy concerns. Events such as Twitter’s acquisition (now X) and major policy changes have driven users toward alternative platforms like Mastodon and Threads. However, this diversification has led to user dispersion and fragmented discussions across isolated social media platforms. To address these issues, federation protocols like ActivityPub have been adopted, with Mastodon leading efforts to build decentralized yet interconnected networks. In March 2024, Threads joined this federation by introducing its Fediverse Sharing service, which enables interactions such as posts, replies, and likes between Threads and Mastodon users as if on a unified platform.
DA - 2025/02/25/
PY - 2025
DO - 10.48550/arXiv.2502.17926
DP - arXiv.org
LA - en
PB - arXiv
ST - FediverseSharing
UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17926
Y2 - 2025/03/01/05:27:34
L1 - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.17926
KW - Computer Science - Computers and Society
KW - Computer Science - Social and Information Networks
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - Från X till Mastodon : socialitet, autonomi och valet att migrera i den digitala världen
AU - Zheng, Mohan
DA - 2025///
PY - 2025
DP - lup.lub.lu.se
LA - swe
ST - Från X till Mastodon
UR - http://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/9185648
Y2 - 2025/03/02/06:05:34
L1 - http://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/9185648/file/9185649.pdf
ER -
TY - GEN
TI - Platform Interoperability and Platform Federations
AU - Wang, Ziming
AU - Cornelius, Philipp B.
AU - Li, Ting
AB - Many digital transaction platforms are incompatible with one another: users of one platform cannot interact with users of another platform, even if bot
CY - Rochester, NY
DA - 2025/01/20/
PY - 2025
DO - 10.2139/ssrn.5104340
DP - papers.ssrn.com
LA - en
PB - Social Science Research Network
UR - https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=5104340
Y2 - 2025/03/02/09:24:27
L1 - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/5104340.pdf?abstractid=5104340&mirid=1
KW - Platform Federations
KW - Platform Interoperability
ER -
TY - GEN
TI - Trust and Friction: Negotiating How Information Flows Through Decentralized Social Media
AU - Hwang, Sohyeon
AU - Nanayakkara, Priyanka
AU - Shvartzshnaider, Yan
AB - 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 tailored decision-making about information flows -- i.e., what user data is shared to whom and when -- and in turn, for protecting user privacy. To better understand how community governance shapes privacy expectations on decentralized social media, we conducted a semi-structured interview with 23 users of the Fediverse, a decentralized social media network. Our findings illustrate important factors that shape a community's understandings of information flows, such as rules and proactive efforts from admins who are perceived as trustworthy. We also highlight ''governance frictions'' between communities that raise new privacy risks due to incompatibilities in values, security practices, and software. Our findings highlight the unique challenges of decentralized social media, suggest design opportunities to address frictions, and outline the role of participatory decision-making to realize the full potential of decentralization.
DA - 2025/03/04/
PY - 2025
DO - 10.48550/arXiv.2503.02150
DP - arXiv.org
PB - arXiv
ST - Trust and Friction
UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/2503.02150
Y2 - 2025/03/09/09:41:15
L1 - http://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.02150v1
L2 - https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.02150
KW - Computer Science - Computers and Society
KW - Computer Science - Social and Information Networks
KW - Computer Science - Human-Computer Interaction
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - Social Influence in the Academic Twitter Migration to Mastodon: A Computational Psychology Approach
AU - Bittermann, André
AU - Lauer, Tim
AU - Peters, Fritz
DA - 2025/03/05/
PY - 2025
DP - www.psycharchives.org
LA - en
ST - Social Influence in the Academic Twitter Migration to Mastodon
UR - https://www.psycharchives.org/en/item/d79fb143-cec8-4390-b154-80a92363e8c9
Y2 - 2025/03/23/11:00:34
L2 - https://www.psycharchives.org/en/item/d79fb143-cec8-4390-b154-80a92363e8c9
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - The journalists’ exodus: Navigating the transition from Twitter to Mastodon and other alternative platforms
AU - Ng, Yee Man Margaret
AU - Ray, Rik
T2 - New Media & Society
AB - This study examines how journalists are grappling with platform migration following Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitterin October 2022. Using a mixed-method approach that combines computational analysis of the activities of 861 journalists on Twitter and Mastodon with qualitative interviews of 11 active journalists, this study aims to (1) examine the extent to which journalists have exhibited different forms of Twitter disengagement post-acquisition; (2) identify the motivating and discouraging factors influencing their move, guided by the push-pull-mooring model; and (3) explore how journalists managed their online presence across platforms. The results indicated minimal Twitter non-use following Musk’s takeover, and full migration was not observed within a 6-month post-acquisition period. Factors such as the flood of fake news and the loss of the blue-tick verification served as push factors, while the appeal of Mastodon’s enhanced user control and stronger community values acted as pull factors. However, the practical reliance on Twitter’s functionalities, audience base, and professional obligations made total abandonment challenging.
DA - 2025/03/17/
PY - 2025
DO - 10.1177/14614448251321165
DP - SAGE Journals
SP - 14614448251321165
LA - EN
SN - 1461-4448
ST - The journalists’ exodus
UR - https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251321165
Y2 - 2025/03/23/11:01:15
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - Moral Entrepreneurs of the Mastodon Migration
AU - Ward, Sean
AU - Davis, Jenny L.
AU - Mackenzie, Adrian
AU - Jones, Paul K.
T2 - Symbolic Interaction
AB - Social media platforms are imbued with politics and values through an interplay of coded architectures, platform policies, economic models, and algorithmic curation, together shaping and shaped by the activities of users. This dynamic set of relations is most evident during moments of disruption, in which platform politics and values come under debate. We examine one such case of disruption through a mixed methods analysis of post-Musk Twitter, tracking the mass user migration from Twitter to Mastodon—an alternative platform distinguished by its federated servers and decentralization. Observed through the lens of symbolic interaction, Twitter and Mastodon are mediated moral enterprises, with migrating users acting as moral entrepreneurs who make claims through both words and actions about how social media platforms ought (and ought not) operate. At the intersection of symbolic interaction and social media studies, we theorize mediated moral enterprise as a tripartite process of idealization, materialization, and actualization, documenting these interrelated elements in the Mastodon migration. This work offers a twofold contribution, elucidating the conditions of a platform disruption while expanding and adapting theories of moral enterprise and moral entrepreneurship for platform-mediated contexts.
DO - 10.1002/symb.1244
DP - Wiley Online Library
VL - n/a
IS - n/a
LA - en
SN - 1533-8665
UR - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/symb.1244
Y2 - 2025/03/27/08:53:37
L1 - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1002/symb.1244
L2 - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/symb.1244
KW - mastodon
KW - social media
KW - materialized action
KW - moral enterprise
KW - platform migration
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - Labour pains: Content moderation challenges in Mastodon growth
AU - Spencer-Smith (Charlotte)
AU - Tomaz (Tales)
AB - After Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, the number of users on the alternative social media platform Mastodon rose dramatically. The sudden influx of new users posed several challenges to content moderation distinct from those in large commercial social media. This article investigates the challenges Mastodon communities have faced and how their admins and content moderators have managed them. Based on scholarly literature, the article contextualises Mastodon as an open source, federated alternative to corporate social media and explains how content moderation is expected to occur in this model, including possible challenges from sudden growth in user numbers. The article then empirically investigates challenges experienced by Mastodon instances post-Musk, based on eight interviews with admins and moderators of seven instances and a representative of Independent Federated Trust & Safety (IFTAS), a non-profit organisation that supports Mastodon content moderators. The research finds that challenges and the responses to them vary depending on the characteristics of the instance, such as size, thematic focus and geography, andinstances tend to adopt measures tailored to their communities. However, a tension between centralisation and decentralisation, including Global North-South differences, cuts across the network, which may be accentuated by further growth.
DA - 2025/03/31/
PY - 2025
DO - 10.14763/2025.1.1831
VL - 14
IS - 1
LA - eng
ST - Labour pains
UR - https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/content-moderation-challenges
Y2 - 2025/04/06/03:45:54
L2 - https://policyreview.info/articles/analysis/content-moderation-challenges
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - Leading the Mastodon Herd: 9th International Workshop on Application of Big Data for Computational Social Science
AU - Gassmann, Luke
AU - McConville, Ryan
AU - Edwards, Matthew
T2 - 2024 IEEE International Conference on Big Data (BigData)
T3 - IEEE International Conference on Big Data
AB - With the development and growing use of social media platforms in the last two decades, platform architectures have driven how we notice, consume and share information. Whilst centralised social networks and the use of recommendation algorithms are a prominently used architecture, in recent years an alternative and novel framework has emerged aiming to offer users a non-commercial decentralised platform to distribute content. Run by users of the platform, Mastodon offers many of the benefits of traditional centralised approaches, however, with the absence of recommendation algorithms there is risk that these architectures could instead promote echo-chambers and the growth of disinformation. With this in mind, we collect a new large Mastodon dataset, consisting of three million connections between over a hundred thousand users. Modelling content using 68 conversational features, and measuring influence using twelve different metrics, we analyse the most common topics being discussed between influential users, the conversational features present in influential content, and the relationships between influence measurements. Our analysis finds a strong correlation between influence and negative traits at every network resolution, with positive and neutral traits in some cases being negatively correlated with influence. Our analysis also shows that influential users have a strong relationship with social/political commentary.
DA - 2025/01/16/
PY - 2025
DO - 10.1109/BigData62323.2024.10825842
DP - University of Bristol
SP - 2939
EP - 2948
SN - 9798350362497
ST - Leading the Mastodon Herd
ER -
TY - JOUR
TI - Keeping Watch Over the Fediverse: Mass Surveillance in Non-Centralized Social Media
AU - Fassbender, Eric
DA - 2025///
PY - 2025
DO - http://www.deeplyhacked.com/research/files/blueleaks.pdf
DP - Google Scholar
ST - Keeping Watch Over the Fediverse
UR - http://www.deeplyhacked.com/research/files/blueleaks.pdf
Y2 - 2025/05/06/05:31:06
L1 - http://www.deeplyhacked.com/research/files/blueleaks.pdf
ER -
TY - GEN
TI - Understanding Decentralized Social Feed Curation on Mastodon
AU - Liu, Yuhan
AU - Song, Emmy
AU - Zhang, Owen Xingjian
AU - Merriman, Jewel
AU - Zhang, Lei
AU - Monroy-Hernández, Andrés
AB - 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 opportunities for customizing feeds, yet user perceptions and curation strategies on these platforms remain unknown. This paper presents findings from a two-part interview study with 21 Mastodon users, exploring how they perceive, interact with, and manage their current feeds, and how we can better empower users to personalize their feeds on Mastodon. We use the qualitative findings of the first part of the study to guide the creation of Braids, a web-based prototype for feed curation. Results from the second part of our study, using Braids, highlighted opportunities and challenges for future research, particularly in using seamful design to enhance people's acceptance of algorithmic curation and nuanced trade-offs between machine learning-based and rule-based curation algorithms. To optimize user experience, we also discuss the tension between creating new apps and building add-ons in the decentralized social media realm.
DA - 2025/04/26/
PY - 2025
DO - 10.48550/arXiv.2504.18817
DP - arXiv.org
PB - arXiv
UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/2504.18817
Y2 - 2025/05/06/05:40:24
L1 - http://arxiv.org/pdf/2504.18817v1
L2 - http://arxiv.org/abs/2504.18817
KW - Computer Science - Human-Computer Interaction
ER -