Have you noticed the rise of decentralized social media like Mastodon? 🌐
In our #CSCW2025 paper, we studied how people perceive and manage their feeds on Mastodon — and what it means for designing tools in future decentralized social platforms.
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Mastodon users are known for rejecting algorithmic feeds — they left Twitter/X because they want full control over what they see. At the same time, the decentralized nature of Mastodon opened up new opportunities and challenges for feed curation.
In this work, we ran a two-part study with 21 Mastodon users:
1️⃣ Interviews on how they perceive and interact with decentralized feeds
2️⃣ Interviews with braids.social, a prototype we built based on the first part for rule-based, transparent curation.
Our results revealed that Mastodon users don’t reject algorithms per se — they rejected the intransparency of the sophisticated algorithms. They developed grassroots methods with simple filters to manage their feeds and use multiple Mastodon apps for different features.
With braids.social, users adjust sliders to mix posts from different sources, and the feed updates instantly. This seamful design makes the algorithm visible—helping Mastodon users trust and accept algorithmic curation.
In decentralized social media, open protocols and APIs enable diverse tool development—but also raise new design challenges.Our work highlights the need for transparency while asking: when apps differ only slightly, could too much choice overwhelm users?
This work was done with my awesome collaborators: Emmy Song, @owen Jewel Merriman, @raynez and @andresmh See details at: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3757688. I’ll be presenting the paper at 14:30 (GMT+2) at Dovregubben-2.
@scottjenson @YuhanLiu @owen @raynez happy to chat! We have a few ongoing new projects related to this so it'd be great to sync. Also, next year we're teaching a class about decentralized protocols where students partner with non-profit organizations in case you're interested in a collaboration.
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