Understanding the growth of the Fediverse through the lens of Mastodon

Abstract

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 Existing studies are however limited to an analysis of a relatively outdated sample of Mastodon focusing on few aspects at a user level, while several open questions have not been answered yet, especially at the instance level.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.

Information Consumption and Boundary Spanning in Decentralized Online Social Networks: the case of Mastodon Users

“…It is worth noticing that, being developed on an up-to-date crawling of Mastodon corresponding to a much larger network than in previous studies, our earlier work in [10] has set the current state-of-the-art data for modeling Mastodon; however, despite the in-depth investigation made on this data, all findings drawn from our earlier study are at instance level only.…”

“…In [10], we recently contributed to studying the decentralized paradigm through Mastodon from a different perspective, i.e., the instance level. First, we created an updated and highly representative dataset of the relationships between Mastodon users, upon which we inferred a network model capturing the relationships between Mastodon instances.…”

“…To conduct our research study, we shall focus on the most widely known and representative Fediverse platform, i.e., Mastodon, which is hence the best suited as case in point for investigating on the DOSN landscape. Moreover, this also allows us to capitalize on up-to-date data resources and relating findings from our earlier work [10].…”

“…In our earlier work [10], we developed a privacy-friendly crawler upon the publicly available Mastodon REST APIs 2 to build an up-to-date and highly representative dataset. It is worth emphasizing that, to preserve privacy requirements, we relied on authenticated requests only, i.e., those towards the instances that allowed accountable requests through their APIs, and we also avoided using any scraping tools.…”

Exploring Content Moderation in the Decentralised Web: The Pleroma Case

“…Zignani et al [30] studied the growth of Mastodon while comparing its structure with Twitter. 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.…”