Software presentation: Rtoot: Collecting and Analyzing Mastodon Data

Abstract

Mastodon is a free and open-source software which allows to run a self-hosted microblogging service, like Twitter. Servers running Mastodon can interoperate, meaning that their users can communicate across different instances. Together, all Mastodon instances form a large decentralized federation of social networking sites. Mastodon was first released in late 2016 but has not attracted as much attention by users and researchers compared to centralized social media platforms such as Twitter. Previous studies on Mastodon (e.g., La Cava et al., 2022; Zulli et al., 2020) classify it as an “alternative social media” platform, in contrast to “corporate social media” platforms such as Twitter. Due to the open-source nature, Mastodon is also famous for being the technology behind far-right social media platforms such as Gab and Donald Trump’s Truth Social. These far-right platforms have also captured certain academic attention (e.g., Zannettou et al., 2018; Zhou et al., 2019). The Twitter takeover by Elon Musk in 2022, however, has changed this alternative—if not fringe—status of the technology and sparked a huge wave of new registrations for instances running Mastodon (Huang, 2022). Mastodon will become increasingly more relevant for communication scholars who study online behavior and phenomena. It is important to note that Mastodon also is a mobile platform. Official mobile apps for the