Understanding the growth of the Fediverse through the lens of Mastodon
Lucio La Cava, Sergio Greco, Andrea Tagarelli

TL;DR
This paper analyzes Mastodon's role in the Fediverse by constructing an up-to-date dataset, examining its network structure, backbone, and growth, revealing key features and evolution patterns of Mastodon instances.
Contribution
It introduces a new comprehensive Mastodon dataset and provides the first detailed network analysis at the instance level, advancing understanding of the Fediverse's structure and growth.
Findings
Mastodon exhibits distinctive macro and mesoscopic network features.
The network backbone reveals core interrelations among instances.
Mastodon's growth pattern shows evolving structural characteristics over recent years.
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 Existing studies are however limited to an analysis of a relatively outdated sample of Mastodon focusing on few aspects at a user level, while several open questions have not been answered yet, especially at the instance level.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…
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