Keyword – online community

Mátyus, Imre:

Diversification in community and interaction within FLOSS communities

The spread of world wide web use in the 1990s and the increasing importance of social media platforms in the 2000s did not only result in a paradigm shift in mass communication, but also generated deeper social changes. In the last few decades, we witnessed the creation of new kinds of communities and practices, generated by the new media devices that play an ever-increasing role in the organisation and operation of communities. This study is to demonstrate such tendencies through the example of open source software communities. More precisely, it shows the changing role and diversification of online platforms in the context of Hungarian Linux users’ interactions. It also attempts to illustrate the connection between the modal and topic-related changes of interactions and the expansion of Linux user communities.

Keywords: interaction, internet studies, Linux, new media, online community, open source, social media