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Poster De Conférence Année : 2018

The structure of a decentralized online social network: Mastodon

Résumé

While in the last decade we witnessed the stunning growing of online social networks like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter-companies which are making a return on investment through advertising and data selling; there is still a niche of activists who are developing various forms of micro-blogging platforms which are seeking inspiration from the original spirit of Twitter. These types of social platforms put the social relationships and the users' contents at the heart of its actions, not providing any advertisement and recommendation algorithms. Among these alternative social networks Mastodon is the newest, the most growing and presents some interesting characteristics: a) Mastodon is not centralized, like Twitter, but is made by interconnected communities being located in different servers, named instances; b) each instance is independently owned, operated, and moderated and supports specific interests, languages, and needs; c) Mastodon provides anti-abuse tools to protect the members of an instance against unwanted contents; and d) users have a more detailed control on the visibility of their posts, in fact each post can be public and visible on local (instance) and global (federated) timelines, public but not visible on the timelines, or private. In this work we gathered the social network made by the relationships between Mastodon's users, and the information (interests, geographical position, supported languages) of the instances they belong to. We analyze its structure and compare its main properties against Twitter 3. Specifically we are wondering if a decentralized architecture results into different characteristics w.r.t. a centralized platform like Twitter. Finally, we focus on the relationships among the different communities (instances) making the Mastodon's backbone.

Domaines

Web
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Dates et versions

hal-02444909 , version 1 (06-02-2020)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-02444909 , version 1

Citer

Matteo Zignani, Sabrina Gaito, Chantal Cherifi, Gian Paolo Rossi. The structure of a decentralized online social network: Mastodon. NetSci, Jun 2018, Paris, France. ⟨hal-02444909⟩
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