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The Failed Migration of Academic Twitter

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.

kbal ,
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

37% of them went so far as to get a mastodon account and mention it in their twitter profile, and then maybe one third of those put some substantial effort into making it work. That's ~90% who didn't bother. In the one small-ish academic field where I followed some of the new arrivals on mastodon when they got there, it very much appeared to me that the failure had nothing to do with the decentralized nature of the platform. It was simply that the small number who made the transition did not add up to enough to form a critical mass and get the discussion going. Some few of them did give it a good try.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

In general, this is true of the broader population as a whole. Mastodon got the size that it’s an actual place (and I think this applies to lemmy/threadiverse too). But it’s by no means “THE place” or even categorically a big public place. More like old-school forums that have a particular user base and vibe that you visit from time to time.

For the fediverse, the “migration” was exciting and successful, but compared to big-social, a drop in the ocean. And the biggest clue for that is that the people most excited about Threads joining the fediverse are Evan (author and lead “advocate” of ActivityPub) and Gargron (masto CEO/founder) … they want to taste that big-social scale and know that they don’t have it and likely never will.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Reality for mastodon, I think, is that the “migration” is basically over, and has been for over a year now. The Brazilian move to BlueSky (and not mastodon) highlights it very well.

Recalibrating on what we want and can do with the fediverse, as well as how central we want the mastodon project to be, are the best things to do now.

For me, it seemed like Gargron didn’t really know how to speak about the lack of a Brazilian migration to mastodon in favour of BlueSky, and handle a new moment of actually dropping in popularity or perceived relevance (having been the underdog then rising start for a while), which I take as a cue that being the dominant center of the fediverse isn’t a natural fit for Gargron and his project, to the point where the fediverse may have just outgrown it.

So, random thoughts:

  • I think de-emphasising mastodon as the fediverse’s big player and surest means of gaining users is likely a good idea in the medium to long term. Replacing twitter for twitter users is now something others do substantially better: Threads and BlueSky. While I’m not sure Mastodon, or its decentralisation, offers anything particularly novel, different or attractive. If anything, its lack of compatibility with other fediverse platforms is likely a negative.
  • More broadly, a focus on microblogging is best de-emphasised, for the same reasons as above. Conspicuously, mastodon is the only platform that’s really trying to replicate twitter-style microblogging. Just about every other platform tries to go beyond it in some way.
  • Instead, IMO, community building through richer and more flexible platforms is what the fediverse should focus on, in large part because it matches what the fediverse’s decentralisation actually provides: control and ownership over your community.
    • Indeed, I think the fediverse needs to kinda wake up to what it really is. So much of the advocacy during the twitter migration was pushing the idea that the decentralisation doesn’t really matter (and “it’s just like email”) and can be ignored for the most part.
    • In reality, it does matter and can’t be easily ignored. And the world has more or less realised that, with mastodon (and the fediverse) now suffering from a branding issue.
    • So I say the way forward is to accept what decentralisation is and either add an additional layer to polish the UX, or lean into it and build on it rather than pretend this place is something else.
  • By community building, I mean “flexible space creation” that likely translates to a range of relatively composable features, structures and content types and formats. Basically, stop rebuilding big-social style platforms, and build “humane spaces” that more or less comprise any/all of the formats of the existing platforms in a way that people can use however they want.
  • Unfortunately, this is likely not trivial, at all, and would likely require better organisation amongst those contributing to the fediverse, and perhaps improvements to the protocol itself.

As for the threadiverse (lemmy, piefed, mbin, nodebb etc), it’s always struck me that group based structures (EG, lemmy communities) seem to work better over federation. Account migration from instance to instance is simpler, in part because the user is not the central organisation. Which instance you’re on doesn’t really matter that much. Also, blocking a whole community seems a useful middle ground between blocking a user and defederating a whole instance at the instance level, and ditto with community level moderation which can operate over federation. Additionally, the little technical talk I’ve seen on the issue seems to indicate that moving a community from instance to another might actually be quite viable.

If true, then community building might be best started with the group based platforms. Maybe an ecosystem of formats that involves all of them other than microblogging might work well?? Perhaps user-based content could take on a different structure from what microblogging does … perhaps something like what BlueSky does could be adapted to fuse user-based structures into group-based platforms like lemmy (IE, your content exists in a pod which you can own and which is portable, which is then sucked up into various public feeds depending on what permissions you provide)??

Things like private communities, group chats, blogs, wikis (and RSS feed management?) intuitively seem to me to pair well with group-based platforms and community building.

lolola ,
@lolola@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Hot take of the day: academia doesn’t need social media.

dogsnest ,
@dogsnest@lemmy.world avatar

But how else will you know if your neighbour’s cousin’s co-worker’s massage therapist’s father likes your kitchen utensils?

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

I don’t think this is true, maybe not at all.

Academia, by its nature, is socially exclusionary. So what they want/need is the ability to have flexibly closed spaces as well as very public spaces. Big-social never really provided that and in many ways I think academia is being kinda left behind by social media.

catloaf ,

All fields need an information sharing platform. Historically, it was in person at conferences or conventions and such. Now it’s online and continuous.

oce ,
@oce@jlai.lu avatar

I have the same issue with Reddit, there’s a middle size good quality subreddit about my specific job which is the best place on the internet to see news and discussions about it in one place. It helps me increase and test my knowledge a lot.

TheTechnician27 ,
@TheTechnician27@lemmy.world avatar

Is there such a community here? Maybe you could start one.

Marsupial ,
@Marsupial@quokk.au avatar

I tried that. No one ever really joined. I tried posting content, and no one ever engaged with it.

Guess theres not many childcare educators on Lemmy as the reddit community is always super active.

Sundial ,

To increase engagement, I propose we have some idiots volunteer to respond to every scientific article and achievement on Mastodon with ridicule and skepticism.

homesweethomeMrL ,

Oh, right. Like that’s gonna help. Pfft.

(How was that)

Sundial ,

You’re perfect ❤️.

fartsparkles , (edited )

Nonsense. If they were perfect, wouldn’t they have used a question mark? Your judgement of character is laughable. What empirical evidence is there that they are perfect?

(How was that?)

Nomecks ,

https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/dcd61276-58eb-4bf7-a7b7-bed14a09ad62.jpeg

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