The Footprints of a “Mastodon”: How a Decentralized Architecture Influences Online Social Relationships

Zignani, Matteo; Quadri, Christian; Gaito, Sabrina; Cherifi, Hocine; Rossi, Gian Paolo

doi:10.1109/infcomw.2019.8845221

Cited by 18 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 14 publications

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“…Social media on the Fediverse usually promote ideas of decentralization, interoperability, free/libre and open-source software (FLOSS), and the absence of algorithmic filters in favor of human curation and moderation. We analyze here a snapshot of this network that was obtained in 2018 by Zignani et al [23] 1 . Contrary to the original publication, we chose here to look at the mesoscale level, i.e.…”

Section: B Decentralized Social Media: the Fediversementioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Weighted directed clustering: interpretations and requirements for heterogeneous, inferred, and measured networks

Fardet¹,

Levina²

2021

Preprint

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Section: B Decentralized Social Media: the Fediversementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The network was obtained from [23] 2 . It contains 3,825 nodes representing servers (instances) that are connected via 81,371 edges.…”

Section: Miyajima and Sakuragawa (2014)mentioning

confidence: 99%

Weighted directed clustering: interpretations and requirements for heterogeneous, inferred, and measured networks

Fardet¹,

Levina²

2021

Preprint

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“…Similarly, La Cava et al [13] explored the evolution of Mastodon at an instance level, as well as the connectivity between instances. Zignani et al [31] further investigated the interrelationship between the Mastodon system design and the social network. Another closely related work [32] looked at how Mastodon users tag their own posts as NSFW.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring Content Moderation in the Decentralised Web: The Pleroma Case

Hassan¹,

Castro²,

Zia³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Decentralising the Web is a desirable but challenging goal. One particular challenge is achieving decentralised content moderation in the face of various adversaries (e.g. trolls). To overcome this challenge, many Decentralised Web (DW) implementations rely on federation policies. Administrators use these policies to create rules that ban or modify content that matches specific rules. This, however, can have unintended consequences for many users. In this paper, we present the first study of federation policies on the DW, their in-the-wild usage, and their impact on users. We identify how these policies may negatively impact "innocent" users and outline possible solutions to avoid this problem in the future.

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“…Focusing on more recently developed and open-source DOSNs, to the best of our knowledge, Mastodon is the only platform in the Fediverse that has received noticeable attention from the research community [4,5,6,7,8,9]. Zulli et al [9] have recently performed a qualitative analysis based on an interview to a sample of instance moderators.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…From a network science perspective, the studies by Zignani et al [6,8] are particularly relevant, as they were the first to analyze a portion of the Mastodon user-network, focusing on degree distribution, triadic closure, and assortativity aspects, and comparing such characteristics to those in Twitter [6]. From the analysis of the in-degree and out-degree distributions, Mastodon is found to show a more balanced behavior between followers and followees than what observed in Twitter.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding the growth of the Fediverse through the lens of Mastodon

Cava¹,

Greco²,

Tagarelli³

2021

Preprint

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Open-source, Decentralized Online Social Networks (DOSNs) are emerging as alternatives to the popular yet centralized and profit-driven platforms like Facebook or Twitter. In DOSNs, users can set up their own server, or instance, while they can actually interact with users of other instances. Moreover, by adopting the same communication protocol, DOSNs become part of a massive social network, namely the Fediverse. Mastodon is the most relevant platform in the Fediverse to date, and also the one that has attracted attention from the research community. Existing studies are however limited to an analysis of a relatively outdated sample of Mastodon focusing on few aspects at a user level, while several open questions have not been answered yet, especially at the instance level.In this work, we aim at pushing forward our understanding of the Fediverse by leveraging the primary role of Mastodon therein. Our first contribution is the building of an up-to-date and highly representative dataset of Mastodon. Upon this new data, we have defined a network model over Mastodon instances and exploited it to investigate three major aspects: the structural features of the Mastodon network of instances from a macroscopic as well as a mesoscopic perspective, to unveil the distinguishing traits of the underlying federative mechanism; the backbone of the network, to discover the essential interrelations between the instances; and the growth of Mastodon, to understand how the shape of the instance network has evolved during the last few years, also when broading the scope to account for instances belonging to other platforms. Our extensive analysis of the above aspects has provided a number of findings that reveal distinguishing features of Mastodon and that can be used as a starting point for the discovery of all the DOSN Fediverse.

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The Footprints of a “Mastodon”: How a Decentralized Architecture Influences Online Social Relationships

Abstract: The impact of the instances on the creation of links are weaker than those imposed by the nationality of the user, i.e. users are more bound by their geographical, cultural

Cited by 18 publications

References 14 publications

Weighted directed clustering: interpretations and requirements for heterogeneous, inferred, and measured networks

Weighted directed clustering: interpretations and requirements for heterogeneous, inferred, and measured networks

Exploring Content Moderation in the Decentralised Web: The Pleroma Case

Understanding the growth of the Fediverse through the lens of Mastodon

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