Information consumption and boundary spanning in Decentralized Online Social Networks: The case of Mastodon users

Decentralized Online Social Networks (DOSNs) represent a growing trend in the social media landscape, as opposed to well-known centralized peers, which are often spotlight due privacy concerns and vision typically focused on monetization through user relationships. By exploiting open-source software, DOSNs allow users create their own servers, or instances, thus favoring proliferation of platforms that independent yet interconnected with each other transparent way. Nonetheless, resulting cooperation model, commonly known Fediverse, still represents world be fully discovered, since existing studies have mainly limited number structural aspects interest DOSNs. In this work, we aim fill lack study relations roles DOSNs, by taking two main actions: understanding impact decentralization how relate within membership instance and/or across different unveiling can explain interrelated axes behavioral phenomena, namely information consumption boundary spanning. To purpose, build our analysis networks from Mastodon, it most widely used DOSN platform. We believe findings drawn Mastodon users’ flow pave way for further development fascinating research