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.
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.
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.
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.