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.
I gave in to peer pressure and finally got Twitter right before shit completely hit the fan, even though I was already uncomfortable with it. I already had a Mastodon user, but not under my real name.
Then, during the exodus, I created a Mastodon user for academic use. This was a few months before defending my PhD in social sciences.
For a while, I was posting the same content on both platforms. On Twitter I am followed by a lot of people in my field, and many of them are still active. On Mastodon, there’s like… two active people specifically in my field.
Still, whenever I post anything both places, I have gotten more interactions on Mastodon than on Twitter. On Twitter a couple of people see it and boost, and they can be somewhat central in the field. But then it kind of deflates. On Mastodon, I get boosts from the ones there in the field, people in adjacent fields (for example the #rstats crowd), interested people from civil society, commentators, a real variety of people. Hell, the other day I was boosted by a folk singer I’ve been a fan of for years but that I didn’t even know was on there.
Meanwhile, I occasionally check the temperature on Bluesky, and I bridge my posts there. Many in my field signed up while it was invite only. Some of them posted one or two posts back then. I haven’t seen any actively since, and nobody from my field has followed my bridged account - but one R stats person has.
I guess they must be on Twitter still, if they are anywhere.
Anyway, point is, my field indeed failed to migrate. But I still achieve more by posting on Mastodon than on Twitter.
I think I saw a paper on this kind of thing over a year ago. Iirc, it said that engagement is lower on Mastodon, but higher quality.