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id	Vol-3194/paper25
wikidataid	→Q117344927
title	Discovering the Landscape of Decentralized Online Social Networks through Mastodon
pdfUrl	https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3194/paper25.pdf
dblpUrl	https://dblp.org/rec/conf/sebd/CavaGT22
volume	Vol-3194→Vol-3194
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Discovering the Landscape of Decentralized Online Social Networks through Mastodon

Discovering the Landscape of Decentralized Online
Social Networks through Mastodon
(Discussion Paper)

Lucio La Cava1 , Sergio Greco1 and Andrea Tagarelli1
1
 Dept. Computer Engineering, Modeling, Electronics, and Systems Engineering (DIMES),
University of Calabria, 87036 Rende (CS), Italy


                                         Abstract
                                         Decentralized Online Social Networks (DOSNs) are gaining popularity in the social media landscape as a
                                         concrete alternative to the centralized and profit-driven counterparts, such as Facebook or Twitter. By
                                         leveraging open-source software and specific protocols, DOSNs allow users to create their own instance
                                         (i.e., server) and federate to an extensive interconnected social network called Fediverse, where users
                                         can transparently communicate with each other, even if registered to different instances. Mastodon
                                         represents the most successful service in the Fediverse to date, and in recent years, it has drawn great
                                         attention from the research community. In this paper, we discuss our recent study [1], which contributed
                                         to advance research on Mastodon and the Fediverse. First, we built the most up-to-date and representative
                                         dataset of Mastodon. Upon this dataset, we defined the network of Mastodon instances and exploited
                                         it to shed light on the key macroscopic and mesoscopic structural features of Mastodon to unveil the
                                         fundamental pillars of the underlying federative mechanism; the backbone of the network, to unveil
                                         the essential interrelations between the instances; and the growth of Mastodon, also accounting for
                                         instances belonging to other services.

                                         Keywords
                                         decentralized online social networks, Mastodon instances, structural network analysis, community
                                         detection, core decomposition, graph pruning




1. Introduction
Nowadays, social networks represent the primary infrastructure to keep inter-personal re-
lationships alive through the Internet, allowing us to cross the world in the blink of an eye.
However, the considerable popularity earned by centralized platforms — i.e., owned by a single
company, as in the case of Facebook or Twitter — has eventually determined a rapid transition
from a user-centric approach to a profit-driven vision concerning user relationships based on
social-marketing goals or advertisement mechanisms. As a result, we witnessed the emergence
of information bubbles and echo chambers, along with privacy concerns, as users increasingly
share their lives within these platforms. The need for bringing the user back to the center of
the stage has led to the rise of a new paradigm known as Decentralized Online Social Networks
(DOSNs) [2, 3], where privacy control and spontaneous interactions among users are favored

SEBD 2022: The 30th Italian Symposium on Advanced Database Systems, June 19-22, 2022, Tirrenia (PI), Italy
$ lucio.lacava@dimes.unical.it (L. La Cava); greco@dimes.unical.it (S. Greco); tagarelli@dimes.unical.it
(A. Tagarelli)
                                       © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
    CEUR
    Workshop
    Proceedings
                  http://ceur-ws.org
                  ISSN 1613-0073
                                       CEUR Workshop Proceedings (CEUR-WS.org)
�and unbiased from external factors. The main components of DOSNs are the availability of
open-source software, which allows anyone to set up their own instance (i.e., server), and the
adoption of specific communication protocols that ensures seamless communication between
(users registered on) different servers. The result is a federated and extensive social network,
known as the Fediverse, where users can use their accounts to interact with peers on other
instances, even belonging to different services. There is a large variety of services composing
the Fediverse, which include Mastodon and Friendica for microblogging, PeerTube, Funkwhale
and PixelFed for multimedia hosting.
   To date, Mastodon is the most well-established service in the Fediverse, and the platform that
has drawn most attention from the research community [4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. Mastodon borrows some
interesting concepts from Twitter, recognizing itself as the decentralized alternative for publish-
ing short texts dubbed toots. Moreover, in analogy with Reddit, Mastodon emphasizes niche —
independent yet linked — communities and content moderation, e.g., instances’ administrators
can declare the main topics and prohibited contents of their instances, or close registrations to
ensure effective content moderation. Besides, users can exploit content warnings mechanisms,
to temporarily hide potentially sensitive content behind a textual summary, dubbed spoiler.
Furthermore, leveraging the ActivityPub protocol, coupled with a subscription-based mecha-
nism, Mastodon allows the aforementioned cross-instance (and service) “extended” followship,
leading to a peculiar manifold timeline structure: home-timeline, containing toots generated
by the followed users, local-timeline, containing toots created within the membership instance,
and federated-timeline, which gathers all public toots from the users known to the membership
instance of a user, being them from the same instance or not.
   Zignani et al. [6, 7] are among the first to study Mastodon from a network-science perspective,
focusing on topological aspects, including degree distribution, triadic closure, and assortativity,
also evaluating similarities and differences w.r.t. Twitter. In this regard, they spotted a more
balanced behavior between followers and followees in Mastodon, as well as a limited fraction
of social bots, which is lower than the one observed in Twitter [10]. Besides, they unveiled that
the clustering coefficient of Mastodon lies between those of Facebook and Twitter. Zignani et al.
also found differences in the degree assortativity in Mastodon compared to the ones shown by
well-known social networks, and shed light on the influence that home-instances have on users’
hubiness. Finally, in [7] the authors discuss about the development of individual instances’
footprint and how it impacts on the underlying relationships between users.
   Despite the recent proliferation of studies on Mastodon, however, the main contributions only
concern user-level interactions, leaving the linkage mechanism between instances unexplored.
Recently, in [1], we contributed to the understanding of the Mastodon instances network from
unprecedented perspectives, including various macroscopic to mesoscopic aspects, the network
backbone and temporal evolution, through the building and exploitation of the most up-to-date
and representative dataset concerning Mastodon relationships. More specifically, in [1] we
addressed the following research questions:

RQ1 – Network data and models: How are the Mastodon instances detected and modeled as a
    network?
RQ2 – Structural features: What are the salient structural features of the network of Mastodon
    instances, at macroscopic as well as mesoscopic level?
�RQ3 – Fingerprint: Are there any clues to the presence of notable phenomena that distinguishes
    Mastodon from centralized OSNs? How does a federative mechanism arise from the
    Mastodon instances?
RQ4 – Network backbone: What is the backbone of the network of Mastodon instances, and
    does it preserve the structural features of the whole network?
RQ5 – Growth: How has the shape of the network of Mastodon instances evolved during the
    last few years?

  In the remainder of this paper, we summarize and discuss the main findings drawn from the
investigation of each of the above outlined research questions. For detailed analysis and results,
the interested reader is referred to [1].


2. Data extraction and modeling
Mastodon crawling. Social networks evolve continuously and the validity of the observed
phenomena can be ephemeral. Within this view, at the time of writing of [1], the only publicly
available dataset [6] concerning the relationships between Mastodon users observed between
2017 and 2018 could have been potentially obsolete. Therefore, to answer our first research
question (RQ1), we developed a privacy-friendly crawler upon the official Mastodon APIs to
create a fresher and more representative dataset, while avoiding any scraping techniques. The
decentralized nature of Mastodon posed some obstacles, as the proliferation of distributed
instances is not easily traceable. Nonetheless, we leveraged the de-facto Mastodon instances
tracker instances.social 1 to retrieve the online instances at the time of the crawling, obtaining
authentication from about 900 of them. We hence traversed such instances, building a seed-set
of approximately 81,000 users, upon which we performed an incremental breadth-first-search
crawling task, i.e., we progressively extracted new users to explore during the outgoing/incoming
links collection. From a technical perspective, we ensured efficient crawling by adopting a
caching mechanism (i.e., Redis) equipped with a MongoDB database. Moreover, to prevent
computational bottlenecks, we demanded the check for duplicate edges to an offline data
refinement step at the end of our crawling phase, using efficient data and network manipulation
software libraries. Also, to meet strict privacy principles, we avoided crawling information from
instances which did not provide us with an authentication token, and suddenly anonymized the
collected links. In this regard, we also resorted to minimal descriptive textual data fetching, to
generate the seed-user set by discovering them through toots we read (but not stored) from the
timelines of the seed instances, to solve the “cold-start” issue of our crawling process.
   Overall, we detected about 28M raw links which, after the removal of duplicate links, led to
the discovery of 1.4M and 18M unique users and links, respectively, with an overall coverage
of more than 16k instances. Nonetheless, since as previously stated, Mastodon allows users to
interact also with services external to the platform, we discerned the Mastodon instances using
a combination of information available on the instances.social and fediverse.party 2 platforms,
resulting in 9,433 known Mastodon instances. We used such information to validate our dataset,

   1
       https://instances.social/
   2
       https://fediverse.party/
�eventually obtaining 6,960 out of 9,433 Mastodon instances (both online and offline), and 1,116
out of 1,193 online instances. These values testify our coverage of most of the online Mastodon
instances to date, up to doubling the earlier state-of-the-art in terms of currently online instances.
As a side yet relevant remark, we emphasize that our dataset includes an exceptional amount
(9,322) of non-Mastodon instances, i.e., belonging to other Fediverse platforms, paving the way
to an in-depth study of the role of Mastodon in the Fediverse.

Network modeling. Given the set 𝒰 of users and the set ℐ of instances available in the
extracted Mastodon data, we denote with 𝒢 = ⟨𝒱, ℰ⟩ a directed network modeling the Mastodon
data, where the node set 𝒱 contains pairs (𝑢, 𝑖), with 𝑢 ∈ 𝒰 and 𝑖 ∈ ℐ, and the edge set ℰ ⊆ 𝒱×𝒱
corresponds to the set of following relations, such that any (𝑥, 𝑦) ∈ ℰ with 𝑥 = (𝑢, 𝑖) and
𝑦 = (𝑣, 𝑗) means that user 𝑢 in instance 𝑖 follows user 𝑣 in instance 𝑗. Note that 𝑢 may coincide
with 𝑣 provided that 𝑖 ̸= 𝑗. To answer the second point of RQ1, we derived from 𝒢 three
Mastodon networks at instance level, which are formally defined as follows.
   To model the relations between all the instances in ℐ, we defined the Instances network
as the directed weighted graph 𝐺ℐ = ⟨𝑉, 𝐸, 𝑤⟩, where 𝑉 = ℐ is the set of nodes, 𝐸 is the set
of edges such that (𝑖, 𝑗) ∈ 𝐸 if there exists at least one user in instance 𝑖 that follows another
user in instance 𝑗, and 𝑤 : 𝐸 ↦→ ℛ is an edge weighting function such that, for any (𝑖, 𝑗) ∈ 𝐸,
𝑤(𝑖, 𝑗) stores the multiplicity of the following relation from 𝑖 to 𝑗 (i.e., number of users in 𝑖
following users in 𝑗).
   Our second network is induced from the set of instances that were detected as online at
the time of the crawling process. By denoting with 𝑉 𝑜 ⊆ ℐ the set of online instances, the
Online-Instances network 𝐺𝑜ℐ = ⟨𝑉 𝑜 , 𝐸 𝑜 , 𝑤𝑜 ⟩, with edge-set 𝐸 𝑜 = 𝐸 ∩ (𝑉 𝑜 × 𝑉 𝑜 ) and edge
weighting function 𝑤𝑜 : 𝐸 𝑜 ↦→ ℛ, is defined to model the connections between the online
instances only. Our third network generalizes the first one by accounting for instances that
have been recognized outside Mastodon. Actually, every link extracted during our crawling
process is by definition incident with at least one instance that belongs to Mastodon. Therefore,
we also defined an expanded network to explore the boundary of the Mastodon network to the
rest of the Fediverse. By denoting with 𝑉 * ⊃ ℐ such expanded set of instances, i.e., the whole
set of crawled instances, the Expanded-Instances network is defined as 𝒢ℐ* = ⟨𝑉 * , 𝐸 * , 𝑤* ⟩,
where 𝐸 * = 𝐸 ∪ {(𝑖, 𝑗) | (𝑖 ∈ 𝑉 ∧ 𝑗 ∈ 𝑉 * ∖ 𝑉 ) ∨ (𝑖 ∈ 𝑉 * ∖ 𝑉 ∧ 𝑗 ∈ 𝑉 )}, and the weighting
function 𝑤* : 𝐸 * ↦→ ℛ follows analogous definition as for the Instances network.
   Considering the size of the three networks, Expanded-Instances contains 16,282 nodes
and 318,218 edges, Instances contains 6,960 nodes and 216,504 edges, and Online-Instances
contains 1,115 nodes and 75,046 edges. Furthermore, we emphasize that about 80% of the
instances in the network modeled by Zignani et al. [6], hereinafter referred to as Earlier, are
also contained in our Instances.


3. Structural analysis of the Mastodon instances network
We answered our second research question (RQ2) by performing an extensive analysis of
macroscopic and mesoscopic properties of the Instances network (Table 1).
 From a macroscopic perspective, we spotted that, in contrast to what is commonly observed
�Table 1
Summary of structural characteristics of the Instances network, including details on community
structure and core decomposition. (* Edge orientation discarded, ** Weighted edges) [1]
                   Instances   Instances inner-most core                    Instances   Instances inner-most core
                                  deg   in-deg   out-deg                                 deg   in-deg    out-deg
  #nodes              6 960       189     208       196    transitivity*      0.128     0.832 0.798       0.807
  #edges            216 504     25 790  28 690    26 463   clust. coeff.*     0.836     0.837 0.810       0.816
  reciprocity        65.1%      88.4%    85.7%    88.2%    clust. coeff.
                                                                              0.687     0.837   0.810     0.816
                                                           (full avg)*
  density            0.004      0.726    0.666     0.692
  avg. deg*         41.966     152.328 157.702 150.98
  avg. in-deg       31.107     136.455 137.933 135.015     modularity         0.289     0.032   0.039     0.037
  % sources           12%         0%      0%        0%     #comm.             5 (5)     3 (3)   3 (3)     3 (3)
                                                           by Louvain*
  % sinks             6.6%        0%    0.005%      0%
  deg. assort.*      -0.274     -0.117  -0.158    -0.135   modularity         0.353     0.242   0.246     0.246
  deg. assort.       -0.253      -0.14  -0.171    -0.151   #comm.             6 (8)     4 (5)   3 (4)     4 (6)
                                                           by Louvain**
  avg. path len.     2.330      1.270    1.330     1.310
  diameter              5          2       2         2     #comm.             6 (54)    1 (3)   1 (4)     1 (3)
                                                           by Infomap**
  #SCC                1 305        1       2         1



in centralized OSNs which tend to exhibit a power-law fitting of their degree distributions,
Mastodon better fits a lognormal degree distribution. Also, we detected few instances that have
higher average degree than the rest of the network.
   Mastodon instances can inherently be bounded to specific topics, as suggested by their
decentralized nature. However, users tend to look for a broader and complementary range of
topics, thus we observed interactions spanning across multiple instances. We ascribe this trait
to a mutual reinforcement mechanism, aimed at reducing the sectorization bias, reasonably
associated with individual instances. This trait certainly matches the capabilities provided by
the underlying shared protocol (i.e., ActivityPub) between instances, and leads to a concept
of federation — manifested through a set of independent yet cooperating instances. We found
structural evidences of such phenomena in the Instances network, as suggested by the high
clustering coefficient values and percentage of reciprocal edges (cf. Table 1). Concerning
such a mutual reinforcement, we also observed degree disassortativity (i.e., negative degree
correlation) [11], which means that users pertaining to different instances with heterogeneous
degrees tend to interact with each other, thus aiming at a better user experience and increasing
the speed of information transfer. This represents another distinctive trait of Mastodon compared
to what is commonly observed in centralized OSNs, even when they are built upon shared
memberships of group [12].
   Distinctive traits of Mastodon have also emerged from our mesoscopic-level analysis. By
resorting to two well-known community detection methods, namely Louvain [13] (both in
its original, undirected implementation and directed implementation) and (directed weighted)
Infomap [14], we unveiled the modular structure within instances, which strengthens the
previous observations concerning the existence of a federated and close-knit framework among
instances. By delving into the nature of such modules, we gained additional insights into
their patterns. Particularly, we report topics, languages and temporal processes (e.g., instances’
creation time) as the primary factors for the community formation. Moreover, we leveraged core
decomposition [15] to shed light on further mesoscopic structural features of our Instances
network [16, 17], spotting a surprising and remarkable number of connections from the inner
�Figure 1: (Left) Illustration of the Expanded-Instances network, with layout based on the force-directed
drawing ForceAtlas2 model. White and light blue indicate online and offline Mastodon instances,
respectively, whereas dark blue corresponds to non-Mastodon instances. (Right) Core decomposition of
the Instances network, based on node in-degrees. Nodes having the same core-index are assigned the
same color (inner-most, resp. outer-most core correspond to red, resp. blue). To avoid cluttering, only
edges having a weight greater than the first quartile of (unique) edge weights are displayed. [1]


cores to the peripheral ones (Fig. 1); further investigation (results not shown) revealed a balance
between links outgoing, resp. incoming, from instances with intermediate core-index values.
Also, we noticed that the majority of links between instances involve the inner-most core.
   As a result, we can state that Mastodon has several unique traits, which constitute its
“fingerprint” — as in the case of the federative mechanism — and make it clearly distinguishable
from well-known centralized OSNs. This also answered our third research question (RQ3).
   In addition, we leveraged two theoretically well-principled graph pruning approaches based on
probabilistic generative null models, namely Disparity Filter [18] and Marginal Likelihood Filter
[19], to detect and remove noisy edges, with the ultimate objective of unveiling the “backbone”
on the Instances network (RQ4). Regardless of the significance thresholds we considered, and
leaving out some minor fluctuations in the measures due to pruning, we surprisingly observed
that the main structural characteristics in the pruned networks remain comparable to those
of the original network — or even more emphasized — further strengthening our previously
identified characteristic features of Mastodon.


4. Following the temporal evolution of Mastodon
To answer our fifth research question (RQ5), we investigated the temporal evolution of Mastodon
through the instance perspective. In particular, we compared the main structural traits of our
Instances network with the Earlier one [6], referring to more than three years ago. Surprisingly,
although the two networks differ in size and in crawling time, they were found to be consistent
�according to several properties: both networks share the same average path length and diameter,
which shows that Mastodon instances act in a small-world fashion; the Earlier network shows
the same disassortative trait as the Instances network, which can be regarded as another
distinctive trait of Mastodon w.r.t. centralized OSNs; and even the mesoscopic point of view
yields some confirmed traits: when accounting for different sizes, in both the Earlier and the
Instances networks, Mastodon instances exhibit high degeneracy values.
   We also analyzed the current status of the Mastodon landscape, narrowing the focus on our
defined Online-Instances network, which exhibits a remarkable reduction in size w.r.t. the
Instances one (-84% instances and -65% links among them). We ascribed this shrinking to the
achievement of a balance in the number of online Mastodon instances, due to the overcoming of
a first initial phase in which the proliferation of new instances is driven by a feeling of novelty.
Interestingly, even the Online-Instances network shows the previously spotted disassortative
trait as well as the high degeneracy in its core decomposition, and the noticeable concentration
of instances in the inner-most core, further validating our findings.
   Finally, to investigate the role of the instances through the temporal growth of Mastodon, we
assessed the strength of relatedness between the PageRank solutions obtained on the above
networks according to Kendall correlation coefficient [20] and Fagin’s intersection metric [21].
As a result, the instance-rankings computed over the different pairs of networks show good or
very high correlation, indicating that the most prestigious instances firmly settle in their roles,
and they do consistently over time. Overall, our investigation on the evolution of Mastodon
allowed us to state that it appears to have reached its structural stability.

5. Conclusions and ongoing work
The user-centric vision and the numerous novelties (e.g., self-hosting and content management)
introduced by the DOSN paradigm has led to the development of many services in the Fediverse.
Among these, Mastodon stands out as the most adopted decentralized social platform and the
most studied by the research community to date. In this paper, we discussed the main findings
of our recent research work [1], where we built the largest and most up-to-date Mastodon
dataset, and we analyzed macroscopic and mesoscopic structural aspects and the growth of the
network of Mastodon instances.
   To complement our findings with user-level insights, we are currently studying the underly-
ing network of Mastodon users [22, 23]. Our goal here is to assess the impact of decentralization
on user behaviors and information flow, and to provide the first in-depth analysis of how users
shape their roles in a decentralized context, by exploiting the dualism between information con-
sumption and boundary spanning. To foster an ever greater understanding of the decentralized
landscape through Mastodon, our Mastodon data can be made available upon request.

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