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

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.