Centralisation on Decentralised Online Social Networks

Sammanfattning: The rapid growth of centralised social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook has raised concerns about privacy and the concentration of power held by the companies behind these services. In response, decentralised social media platforms have emerged as alternatives, forming federations of various instances without a single owner. However, these decentralised platforms have faced challenges with centralisation, as users tend to gather on larger instances. This paper examines Mastodon, one of the most popular decentralised platforms, to explore whether its onboarding flow and website design can be modified to encourage less centralisation. The study maps Mastodon's onboarding flow and identifies potential modifications to mitigate centralisation. Additionally, a new design for the official website is proposed. User tests involving five participants were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of these changes. The results indicate that modifying the design can influence users to choose smaller servers. One effective modification is randomising the order in which servers are presented, eliminating the advantage of larger servers. Another proposed change is to improve user awareness about how feeds and interactions on Mastodon spans servers, enabling users to interact beyond their own server and removing a motivation for choosing a larger one. But the impact of this information on user behaviour remains inconclusive in the user tests. Overall, this research suggests that through design modifications, Mastodon can encourage users to select smaller servers and foster a more decentralised social media environment.