CommunityData:Fediverse research

As part of an ongoing research project led by Carl Colglazier and supervised by Aaron Shaw, members of our research group are currently gathering data from the Fediverse, a collection of decentralized social networks (DSNs).

Project Goals

The purpose of this project is to advance academic research on communication and interactions in DSNs. Our work is non-commercial and aims to collect only public records in compliance with community/system norms.

Some examples of research questions we are working on include:

• What are the effects of de-federation events on activity and toxicity?
• How might we recommend servers to join for Fediverse newcomers?
• How do people on the Fediverse use data portability affordances?

Data collection

We operate a script from a server hosted by Northwestern University (at kibo.soc.northwestern.edu) which collects data from Fediverse server public timelines including public statuses, server metadata, and federation peers. The script does not collect any direct messages, followers only messages, IP addresses, or unlisted messages. Posts from individual accounts or servers that do not provide public timelines may be coincidentally gathered if their content was included in the public timelines of other servers. In an effort to be transparent, the script links to this page in its user agent.

In all of our studies, we do not intend to publish or release identifiable data in any form.

Funding and Disclaimer

This work is being conducted as part of a broader set of investigations into the ecology of online communities. It is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant numbers IIS-1910202 and IIS-1908850.

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Contact

Do you have further questions about this project? Concerns about how the work is being conducted or technical considerations you would like to discuss? Please contact Aaron Shaw and/or Carl Colglazier. Carl can also be found via his Fediverse account. We'll do our very best to reply within 24 hours.

Notes

References

Carl Colglazier, Nathan TeBlunthuis, Aaron Shaw. "The Effects of Group Sanctions on Participation and Toxicity: Quasi-experimental Evidence from the Fediverse." In Proceedings of the Eighteenth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 18, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v18i1.31316

Carl Colglazier. "Do Servers Matter on Mastodon? Data-driven Design for Decentralized Social Media." Proceedings of the 18th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, DeWeb 2024: 1st International Workshop on Decentralizing the Web, 2024. https://workshop-proceedings.icwsm.org/abstract.php?id=2024_43