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 🚀

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