Collecting and Analyzing Public Data from Mastodon

Understanding online behaviors, communities, and trends through social media analytics is becoming increasingly important. Recent changes in the accessibility of platforms like Twitter have made Mastodon a valuable alternative for researchers. In this tutorial, we will explore methods for collecting and analyzing public data from Mastodon, a decentralized micro-blogging social network. Participants will learn about the architecture of Mastodon, techniques and best practices for data collection, and various analytical methods to derive insights from the collected data. This session aims to equip researchers with the skills necessary to harness the potential of Mastodon data in computational social science and social data science research.