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

TL;DR

This study investigates how Mastodon users interact and span boundaries across decentralized social network instances, revealing user roles and information flow patterns to better understand DOSNs' social dynamics.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of user roles and information flow in Mastodon, highlighting the impact of decentralization on user relations and boundary spanning.

Findings

Identification of distinct user roles in Mastodon

Insights into information consumption patterns

Understanding of boundary spanning behaviors

Abstract

Decentralized Online Social Networks (DOSNs) represent a growing trend in the social media landscape, as opposed to the well-known centralized peers, which are often in the spotlight due to privacy concerns and a vision typically focused on monetization through user relationships. By exploiting open-source software, DOSNs allow users to create their own servers, or instances, thus favoring the proliferation of platforms that are independent yet interconnected with each other in a transparent way. Nonetheless, the resulting cooperation model, commonly known as the Fediverse, still represents a world to be fully discovered, since existing studies have mainly focused on a limited number of structural aspects of interest in DOSNs. In this work, we aim to fill a lack of study on user relations and roles in DOSNs, by taking two main actions: understanding the impact of decentralization on how users relate to each other within their membership instance and/or across different instances, and unveiling user roles that can explain two interrelated axes of social behavioral phenomena, namely information consumption and boundary spanning. To this purpose, we build our analysis on user networks from Mastodon, since it represents the most widely used DOSN platform. We believe that the findings drawn from our study on Mastodon users' roles and information flow can pave a way for further development of fascinating research on DOSNs.