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arXiv · 2503.07068

Comparing User Activity on X and Mastodon

Shiori Hironaka·Mitsuo Yoshida·Kazuyuki Shudo
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Abstract

The "Fediverse", a federation of decentralized social media servers, has emerged after a decade in which centralized platforms like X (formerly Twitter) have dominated the landscape. The structure of a federation should affect user activity, as a user selects a server to access the Fediverse and posts are distributed along the structure. This paper reports on the differences in user activity between Twitter and Mastodon, a prominent example of decentralized social media. The target of the analysis is Japanese posts because both Twitter and Mastodon are actively used especially in Japan. Our findings include a larger number of replies on Twitter, more consistent user engagement on mstdn.jp, and different topic preferences on each server.

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Shiori Hironaka, Mitsuo Yoshida, Kazuyuki Shudo. 2025-03-10. Comparing User Activity on X and Mastodon. https://doi.org/10.1109/bigdata62323.2024.10825212

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