About The Workshop
The social media landscape is undergoing significant transformation as new, alternative platforms emerge, shifting the focus from traditional, centralized networks to more user-centric experiences. Platforms like Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon and the broader Fediverse are redefining how users engage with content and interact with each other, offering unique features, such as community building and feed curation, aiming to foster more authentic engagement and creative expression. Furthermore, unlike traditional platforms such as X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook, which are often criticized for their closed ecosystems and restricted paid access to data, these emerging platforms are characterized by greater openness to researchers, allowing for the usage of public APIs to analyze user behavior, study online communities, and experiment with new features.This workshop aims to comprehensively explore the growing landscape of next-generation and alternative social platforms, seeking to shed light on the key challenges and opportunities inherent in this paradigm shift. Particular emphasis will be placed on how these platforms are reshaping community formation, content creation, and user engagement, and explore their broader implications for digital interactions. We believe investigating these points becomes now crucial for researchers across different fields, including computer science, human-computer interactions, and computational social science, due to the increasing interest in such platforms. This workshop has the goal of fostering interdisciplinary discussions, facilitating collaboration among diverse research communities, thereby playing a pivotal role in shaping the future of online platforms and interactions.
Topics
This workshop seeks to esplore contributions ranging multiple research fields, such as Network
Science, Natural Language Processing, and Computational Social Science, aiming to
facilitate the exchange of methodologies and empirical findings to foster a deeper understanding
of the dynamics of the next-generation and alternative social media platforms.
The topics of interest of the Next-Gen and Alternative Social Media Workshop include but are not
limited to:
- Structures and dynamics in next-gen/alt social media platforms
- Graph mining in next-gen/alt social media platforms
- NLP in next-gen/alt social media platforms
- Coordinated and cooperative user behaviors within next-gen/alt social media platforms
- Migratory phenomena towards next-gen/alt social media platforms
- Misinformation, disinformation, and fake news in next-gen/alt social media platforms
- Content moderation in next-gen/alt social media platforms
- Community search, detection, and evolution in next-gen/alt social media platforms
- Polarization phenomena in next-gen/alt social media platforms
- Ethical and privacy aspects of next-gen/alt social media platforms
- Dataset and resources for studying next-gen/alt social media platforms
Dates & Submissions
Important Dates
Submission Deadline:March 31, 2025April 14, 2025
Notifications:May 1, 2025
Camera-Ready Due:May 8, 2025
Early Registration Deadline:May 9, 2025
Workshop Day:
All deadlines are 11:59 PM AOE (Anywhere On Earth)
Authors Guidelines & Submission Instructions
Submit via the CMT portal: https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/NextGenSocial2025/
All submissions should be single-blind and in English, and have to follow the AAAI two-column, camera-ready style AAAI 2025 Author Kit on Overleaf or AAAI 2025 Author Kit.zip (Word or LaTeX). Submitted papers must adhere to the ICWSM guidelines, but authors do not need to compile the ethics checklist required for submissions to the main research track of ICWSM.
The accepted short papers (not the 2-page abstracts) will be published in the ICWSM Workshop Proceedings (https://workshop-proceedings.icwsm.org/) by the AAAI Press.
The Next-Gen and Alternative Social Media Workshop is expected to be in person, and we encourage you to attend in person to fully engage with the community. However, we are also planning a virtual option for those who cannot attend in person. More details will be provided soon.
Program
All times below are Central European Summer Time (CEST)
📚 Proceedings are now available!
Check them out in the ICWSM 2025 Workshop Proceedings
👋🏻 Welcome, Setup & Opening Remarks
Workshop Organizers
🌐 Paper Session #1: Decentralized and Next-Gen Social Media
-
An Overview of Decentralized Online Social Networks
Ujun Jeong, Lynnette Hui Xian Ng, Kathleen M. Carley, Huan Liu
-
Partitioned Realities: How Next Generation Social Media Platforms Shape Competing Narratives
of "Truth"
Mao Li, Xinyi Chen
🐘 Paper Session #2: Mastodon
-
Sentiment Dynamics and Shifts across Instances on Mastodon
Seeun Kim, Li Zeng, Sijia Ma, Giulia Sturlese
-
Whose rules are we following in Decentralized Networks? Privacy Policies, Instance rules and
descriptions in Mastodon
Shrushti Umesh Kaul, Mehmet Sıddık Aktaş, Mirela Riveni
-
Data Ethics in the Fediverse: Analyzing the Role of Instance Policies in Mastodon
Research
Mareike Lisker, Helena Mihaljević
☕️ Coffee Break
🦋 Paper Session #3: Bluesky
-
Why Academics Are Leaving Twitter for Bluesky
Dorian Quelle, Frederic Denker, Prashant Garg, Alexandre Bovet
-
Is Bluesky the New Twitter? An Analysis After Its Public Launch
Gianluca Nogara, Erfan Samieyan Sahneh, Matthew DeVerna, Nick Liu, Luca Luceri, Filippo Menczer, Francesco Pierri, Silvia Giordano Cremonese
💻 Data Challenge
Hands-on collaborative activity and discussion to create shared resources for researching Next-Generation and Alternative Social Media platforms
🎉 Closing Remarks
Workshop Organizers
Registration
Please refer to the ICWSM2025 Conference Website for registration details and instructions.
Data Challenge
The workshop will feature a collaborative task to design and curate data-driven shared resources through the
open and free-to-use APIs offered by next-generation and alternative social media
platforms.
Participants will work together to explore the potential of these APIs, brainstorming, and outlining
innovative ways to collect and structure data that can advance research in this field.
Framed as a
game-like exercise, this activity will encourage creativity and teamwork as participants practice preliminary
data collection and share insights to shape the vision for impactful resources. To this aim, participants will
be guided via ready-to-use Python notebooks containing detailed instructions and examples on how to use these
APIs.
Beyond the workshop, this collective effort aims to inspire innovative research ideas, foster
lasting collaborations, and lay the groundwork for shared data resources that can benefit the broader research
community.
Workshop Location
Aalborg University Copenhagen
Denmark
The Next-Gen and Alternative Social Media Workshop will be held in conjuction with the AAAI ICWSM 2025 Conference, whose workshops will be hosted at the Aalborg University Copenhagen.
Organizers
Lucio La Cava
Assist. Professor @ University of Calabria
Luca Maria Aiello
Assoc. Professor @ ITU Copenhagen
Sabrina Gaito
Professor @ University of Milan
Andrea Tagarelli
Assoc. Professor @ University of Calabria
