We are thrilled to announce the release of two new Mastodon data collectors in Communalytic:
- The Mastodon Recent Posts Data Collector retrieves recent public posts and replies from a specified public Mastodon server.
- The Mastodon Hashtag Search Data Collector retrieves recent public posts and replies with a specified hashtag from any public Mastodon server.
Users of Communalytic EDU can retrieve up to 5,000 recent posts and replies from Mastodon, while Communalytic PRO users can retrieve up to 50,000. Communalytic users can start collecting data immediately without first having to create a Mastodon account or apply for a separate Mastodon API key.
These new data collectors will provide Communalytic users with a systematic way to collect publicly available Mastodon data for academic research and are being released as part of our work developing research tools, techniques, and visualization dashboards to support computational social science.
For more details, see Communalytic’s Tutorials page.
About Mastodon:
Mastodon is a microblogging social network that provides an experience similar to X (formerly Twitter). However, unlike X which is centralized and is owned and operated by a single company or individual, Mastodon, on the other hand, is a decentralized social network consisting of thousands of independent servers called Instances. Every Instance has its own independent server, homepage, community, and rules, and it’s administered and moderated by different people. Users can join any public Instance, interact with users across other Instances and change/migrate between Instances.
About Communalytic
Communalytic is a computational social science research tool for studying online communities and discourse. It can collect and analyze publicly available data from various social media platforms via provided public APIs, including CrowdTangle (for Facebook/Instagram), Reddit, Telegram, YouTube, and X (formerly Twitter), or you can import your own CSV or JSON data files.
Communalytic also contains a suite of advanced data analytics modules, including a Toxicity Analyzer, a Sentiment Analyzer, a Topic Analyzer and a built-in Network Analyzer. These modules can be used to automatically:
- Detect anti-social interactions (i.e., harassment, hate speech, extremist content, etc.);
- Assess sentiments in online discourse;
- Identify and group together social media posts that are semantically similar and identify latent topics within your dataset; and,
- Generate and visualize various types of networks, including communication and link-sharing networks, which can be used to identify influencers, map shared interests among online actors, study the spread of mis/dis-information and detect signs of possible coordination among seemingly disparate actors.
The EDU version of Communalytic is free to use and is designed to help students learn about social media data analytics and social network analysis.
The PRO version is designed for the academic research community and is ideal for large-scale academic research projects. It provides researchers with the resources and infrastructure necessary for conducting independent research in the public interest.