Comparing User Activity on X and Mastodon.

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arxiv.org/abs/2503.07068

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 this http URL, and different topic preferences on each server.

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I think that methodology is wrong. If they analyzed only one instance, then the whole follwer-followee thing might be completely off. And while they measured how many replied frequently, it lacks the "how many replies they got" side

It's like comparing engagement on whole network vs via only one edge

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Interesting report. Might give Mastodon a try someday, I quit Twitter a little bit before the acquisition.

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Just FYI: Data is from May till June 2023. Musk took over Twitter end of Oct. / Nov 2022. A lot of stuff has happened since then, so that study can't tell you much about the current X

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Nazi posts are way up on X.

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I thought MissKey was more popular in Japan?

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These are Japanese language posts from 2023

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Impressive, very nice. Now let's see Twitter adjusted for bot activity

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Mastodon is terrible compared to X. Would not recommend it to anyone.

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