A New Study Investigates 'The Failed Migration of Academic Twitter' To Mastodon ( arxiv.org )

Archived version

Abstract

Following change in Twitter’s ownership and subsequent changes to content moderation policies, many in academia looked to move their discourse elsewhere and migration to Mastodon was pursued by some. Our study looks at the dynamics of this migration. Utilizing publicly available user account data, we track the posting activity of academics on Mastodon over a one year period. Our analyses reveal significant challenges sustaining user engagement on Mastodon due to its decentralized structure as well as competition from other platforms such as Bluesky and Threads. The movement lost momentum after an initial surge of enthusiasm as most users did not maintain their activity levels, and those who did faced lower levels of engagement compared to Twitter. Our findings highlight the challenges involved in transitioning professional communities to decentralized platforms, emphasizing the need for focusing on migrating social connections for long-term user engagement.

technocrit ,

It's hard to imagine free and sane people intentionally using xitter.

Fitik ,

@tardigrada At least thanks to Bridgy ( @bsky[email protected] ) BlueSky is becoming more connected to the Fediverse, sadly only a few thousand people have opted in, but it does have a lot of a potential

darkphotonstudio ,

And how's that academic discourse working out on a service that caters to fascists and actively hates academia?

recently_Coco ,
@recently_Coco@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

It's a shame, really. A non-centralized internet has existed before and must exist again if it's to remain useable. It's sad so many have given up because of early internet struggles. Things are even far less painful now than I remember them being in the past.

davehtaylor ,
@davehtaylor@beehaw.org avatar

Because federation is a mess, and doesn't really solve the problem. There's no quick elevator pitch that non-technical people can understand, on-boarding is painful, and even if you as the publisher understand it, your audience may not.

Kichae ,

Federation isn't a mess, it's just... messier. And too many federated services do their damnedest to hide that they function differently, meaning people treat them like they're perfect drop-in replacements.

It results in a lot of questions about "Why can't I ____?" and answers of the "Because this doesn't work that way" variety.

Like, look at Mastodon. It bends over backwards to hide the fact that it's 10,000 different websites. The result is that people could not understand what the big deal was, nor why it wasn't as easy to see everything from some other website as easily as they could from a single website that everyone was using.

This further led to centralization of the Mastodon ecosystem, which... I mean, at that point, you're just abandoning the central concept.

Domiku ,

I think the biggest problem that Mastodon et. al need to solve is changing servers/accounts. There needs to be an easy way to move servers while retaining past posts, etc.

Kichae ,

But does there?

This comes back to what federation and "the fediverse" is, and why trying to hide its nature is harming it.

No one expects their Facebook post history to follow them to Reddit, or to a forum, or to Lemmy, because they're different websites. Just as no one expected their Twitter history to come with them to Mastodon.

But because it's framed as "Mastodon" and not "social.website.com" the expectations are different.

Domiku ,

No but when I tried to change Mastodon servers, I was frustrated to learn that I could carry over my followers but nothing else. The platform highlighted "easy mobility," but I found that to be misleading.

Kichae ,

Yeah, there's plenty about how Mastodon frames itself and its features that are frustrating. That "easy mobility" requiring an 80 step process that involves downloading and re-uploading a bunch of files kind of anchors you for seeing how disconnected some developers are from the user expectations they set.

Yearly1845 ,

It has the same kind of infrastructure as email but for social media.

Done. 13 words for the average schmuck.

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