---
title: "Do Servers Matter on Mastodon? Data-driven Design for Decentralized Social Media"
short-title: Mastodon Recommendations
authors:
  - name: Carl Colglazier
    affiliation:
      name: Northwestern University
      city: Evanston
      state: Illinois
      country: United States
    corresponding: true
bibliography: references.bib
pdf-engine: pdflatex
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abstract: |
  When trying to join Mastodon, a decentralized collection of interoperable social networking servers, new users face the dilemma of choosing a home server. Using trace data from millions of new Mastodon accounts, we show that new accounts are less likely to remain active on the network's largest general instances compared to others. Additionally, we observe a trend of users migrating from larger to smaller servers. Addressing the challenge of onboarding and server selection, the paper proposes a decentralized recommendation system for server using hashtags and the Okapi BM25 algorithm. This system leverages servers' top hashtags and their frequency to create a recommendation mechanism that respects Mastodon's decentralized ethos. Simulations demonstrate that such a tool can be effective even with limited data on each local server.
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---

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