My Thoughts on Threads – Meta’s new text-based platform

On Thursday, Meta (you know, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp) launched a new social media platform. It’s called Threads and it can be described as “text-based” microblogging platform similar to that of Twitter and Mastodon with around 55 millions users. With the downfall of Twitter, Meta seeks to add its own competitor … Read more

How to Build Tag Clouds From Mastodon Hashtags

Hashtags are an important part of microblogging and are used to reach a wider audience of interested people. Much like Twitter, hashtags are also widely used on Mastodon and it’s common for users to include as many hashtags as possible in their posts to maximum the audience reach. Also, as shown in a previous post, … Read more

How to Import a Network From a Spreadsheet Using Gephi

Gephi, is an amazing piece of software for building and visualising different types of network. It is considered the go-to software for network analytics and visualisation and is widely used by those who study social networks, such as myself. I use Gephi almost on a daily basis. As well as producing some amazing visuals, Gephi … Read more

What Is the Fediverse, and Why Does It Matter?

Users of the internet have witnessed many movements over the past few decades. We have seen the shift from Web 2.0 to 3.0 and social media’s rise and widespread use. There is, however, a new movement taking place on the internet which is becoming increasingly hard to ignore. What am I referring to exactly? I … Read more

Building A Social Network from Retweets in Python: A Simple Guide

EDIT (Feb 2023): As of 09/02/2023, Twitter is closing down public access to the API and replacing it with a paid service. Social media is incredibly useful for maintaining friendships, reaching out and interacting with others. In particular, social media platforms like Twitter allow people to share and exchange ideas freely and easily. In a … Read more