Mastodon #research 🚀

Ever wondered what keeps federated platforms like Mastodon thriving?
My thesis is now officially available: Sustaining Decentralised Social Platforms – Analysing User Activity and Governance Structures on Mastodon. If you're curious, give it a read!
🔗 https://phaidra.univie.ac.at/detail/o:2118817

Huge thanks to everyone who participated in the survey – your voices truly shaped this work.
Special thanks as well to my supervisor @cypherhippie for the guidance throughout.

I hope it inspires you!

Mastodon #research 🚀

I’ve officially completed my studies and want to share some insights from my thesis on user activity on Mastodon!

Using API data and a user survey, I analysed what drives user activity. Key findings were:

📌 Instance size & active engagement (tooting, interacting) are the strongest predictors of user activity.
📌 Governance structures & technical infrastructure play supportive but less decisive roles.

Here’s a graph with the correlation results from the user study:

Mastodon #research 🚀
Thank you all so much for participating in my survey and boosting my toots! I’ve officially closed the questionnaire now, and I’m excited to share that I collected an incredible 3,615 responses! 🌍✨

I never imagined it would reach so many people across the world. I’m really looking forward to diving into the analysis next week and sharing some preliminary results with you soon. Your support has been EVERYTHING for this research – thank you again!

Thank you all so much for your support with my thesis! 🙌
I’m incredibly grateful for everyone who boosted my toot and contributed to my research—it means so much to me.

Right now, I’m going through all your mentions and comments, working to address your feedback and resolve a few issues. I will try to get back to everyone who contacted me. Thank you again 💜

Mastodon #research 🚀

I’m working on my master’s thesis at the University of Vienna, and I’d love your input! My research focuses on sustaining long-term user activity on Mastodon, contributing to a more active Fediverse. If you have a few minutes, please take my short survey:
👉 https://sosci.univie.ac.at/MastodonActivity/

Your thoughts will contribute to meaningful research. Feel free to boost this post so we can reach as many users as possible. Thank you so much! 🙌

#Mastodon #Survey #FediverseResearch

Mastodon #research 🚀

Did you know that active users on Mastodon have been declining after an initial surge in October 2022 aka the big Twitter migration? 🐦

In my master thesis, I’m exploring reasons for this, like the challenges of #moderation on growing instances and lower engagement compared to other social networks. What do you think is causing this decline? Let me know! 💬

Source of data and image 📷: @erickhun

Doing Mastodon #research 🚀

For my master thesis I'm dividing instances into small (<100 users) and large (100+ users). Why? Because after some trial and error my computational results change noticeably at this threshold! Have you observed something similar? Or how would you define small vs large instances? 💜

#mastodon #university #fediverse