A Herd of Young Mastodonts: the User-Centered Footprints of Newcomers After Twitter Acquisition

TL;DR

This paper analyzes Mastodon's user social structures during its surge, revealing ego network patterns similar to other OSNs and highlighting Mastodon as a valuable open data source for studying human social behavior.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of Mastodon's ego networks, demonstrating their similarity to established models and establishing Mastodon as a key platform for social behavior research.

Findings

Mastodon ego networks follow Dunbar's model.

Clear signs of ego network formation during initial diffusion.

Mastodon can serve as an open 'big data microscope' for social analysis.

Abstract

The tremendous success of major Online Social Networks (OSNs) platforms has raised increasing concerns about negative phenomena, such as mass control, fake news, and echo chambers. In addition, the increasingly strict control over users' data by platform owners questions their trustworthiness as open interaction tools. These trends and, notably, the recent drastic change in X (formerly Twitter) policies and data accessibility through public APIs, have fuelled significant migration of users towards Fediverse platforms (primarily Mastodon). In this work, we provide an initial analysis of the microscopic properties of Mastodon users' social structures. Specifically, according to the Ego network model, we analyse interaction patterns between a large set of users (egos) and the other users they interact with (alters) to characterise the properties of those users' ego networks. As was observed previously in other OSNs, we found a quite regular structure compatible with the reference Dunbar's Ego Network model. Quite interestingly, our results show clear signs of ego network formation during the initial diffusion of a social networking tool, coherent with the recent surge of Mastodon activity. Therefore, our analysis motivates the use of Mastodon as an open "big data microscope" to characterise human social behaviour, making it a prime candidate to replace those OSN platforms that, unfortunately, cannot be used anymore for this purpose.