Digital diakonia: a netnography and social network analysis of catholic school-led public service initiatives on social media in Indonesia

Catholic schools increasingly enact and publicise their diaconal mission – service to neighbour – through social media, yet little empirical research examines how this occurs in Indonesia, where Catholic schools operate as minority-faith institutions within a Muslim-majority society. This study combines netnography with social network analysis (SNA) to examine how five Indonesian Catholic school social media accounts represented public-service initiatives over a twelve-month period (January-December 2025), and how their surrounding publics engaged with and circulated this content. The corpus comprised 300 service-related posts, 600 associated public comments, and a reconstructed interaction network of 100 actors and 1000 ties across Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. Posts were coded using a three-tier framework combining a priori theological categories (diakonia, koinonia, kerygma, interfaith solidarity), descriptive content codes, and emergent themes. Findings show that 85.7% of posts carried an explicit theological reference and 65% carried interfaith markers, with orphanage support, school-supply donation, and health outreach the most frequent initiative types. Posts framed through specific theological registers – Lenten reflection and love of neighbour – drew higher mean engagement than generically worded ‘faith in action’ content. Network analysis revealed a moderately dense (density = .183), five-community structure in which school accounts and a small number of individual commenters occupied central brokerage positions; within the interfaith-outreach subnetwork specifically, NGO and interfaith actors disproportionately occupied bridging rather than peripheral roles. The study extends netnographic and mission-in-practice scholarship on Catholic education into an under-examined, digitally mediated, interfaith Indonesian context.