Comparing User Activity on X and Mastodon

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.