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David Blue on Glass
David Blue on Glass
Software Historian, digicam.love wannabe. For reasons both personal and professional, my iPhone 4S has remained my favorite lens-equipped cellular tel…
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David Blue on Glass
Understanding the growth of the Fediverse through the lens of Mastodon - Applied Network Science
Understanding the growth of the Fediverse through the lens of Mastodon - Applied Network Science
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 Existing studies are however limited to an analysis of a relatively outdated sample of Mastodon focusing on few aspects at a user level, while several open questions have not been answered yet, especially at the instance level.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.
MastodonMastodon#Academia ⁖⁅⁁#Social Web
·appliednetsci.springeropen.com·
Understanding the growth of the Fediverse through the lens of Mastodon - Applied Network Science
Mastodon Rules: Characterizing Formal Rules on Popular Mastodon Instances | Companion Publication of the 2023 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
Mastodon Rules: Characterizing Formal Rules on Popular Mastodon Instances | Companion Publication of the 2023 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
Federated social networking is an increasingly popular alternative to more traditional, centralized forms. Yet, this federated arrangement can lead to dramatically different experiences across the network. Using a sample of the most popular instances on the federated social network Mastodon, we characterize the types of rules present in this emerging space. We then compare these rules to those on Reddit, as an example of a different, less centralized space. Rules on Mastodon often pay particular attention to issues of harassment and hate — strongly reflecting the spirit of the Mastodon Covenant. We speculate that these rules may have emerged in response to problems of other platforms, and reflect a lack of support for instance maintainers. With this work, we call for the development of additional instance-level governance and technical scaffolding, and raise questions for future work into the development, values, and value tensions present in the broader federated social networking landscape.
MastodonMastodon#Academia ⁖⁅⁁#Policy#Social Web
·dl.acm.org·
Mastodon Rules: Characterizing Formal Rules on Popular Mastodon Instances | Companion Publication of the 2023 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing