The Failed Migration of Academic Twitter: A Case Study of Precocious Adopters
2024/06/06 by Xinyu Wang, Sai Koneru, Wang, Xinyu +3 · 14 voices · 4 citations
#cs.SI
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2406.04005
Abstract
Following changes in Twitter's ownership in 2022 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 examines the behavior of a self-organized group of early academic adopters who joined Mastodon following changes in Twitter's ownership. Utilizing publicly available user account data drawn from a voluntarily curated list of academics, we track the posting activity of these early adopters on Mastodon over a one-year period. We also study follower-followee and interaction relationships to map internal networks, finding that the subset of academics who migrated to Mastodon were well-connected. However, this strong internal connectivity was insufficient to prevent users from returning to Twitter/X. Our analyses show that early adopters struggled to maintain engagement, shaped by Mastodon's decentralized design and competition from alternatives such as Bluesky and Threads. The migration effort lost momentum after an initial surge, as most early adopters reduced activity or returned to Twitter. Our survival analysis further reveals that retention is strongly linked to diverse cross-server engagement and topic-specific server communities. Users with large pre-existing Twitter presence face significantly higher attrition risk, highlighting the challenge of replicating established social connections in a decentralized ecosystem. By examining the coordinated migration attempt of early adopters, we find that even this highly motivated group faced substantial challenges, suggesting that later or less coordinated efforts would likely encounter even greater barriers.
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Discussions
- The failed migration of academic Twitter [hn, 39 points, 13 comments]
- Migration from Twitter/X didn't exactly work as intended for #academia or for #BlackTwitter. Most of my Twitter/X PLN from pre-Musk are still active there. But in other spaces there are new pocket-s [bsky, 29 points, 2 comments]
- "The movement [of academics away from Twitter to other platforms] lost momentum after an initial surge of enthusiasm ..." It's on all of us to make the academic Social Media platform switch finally w [bsky, 9 points, 0 comments]
- Hmm, as one who migrated, I certainly don't feel "failed" I DO feel morally clean, though... arxiv.org/abs/2406.04005 [bsky, 7 points, 2 comments]
- Academic migration from Twitter last time (h/t Matt Clancy) If we don't work on coordination & community here, we will fail (h/t me.) #EconRead arxiv.org/abs/2406.04005 [bsky, 7 points, 0 comments]
- It seems that Academic Twitter has yet to really find a new home. We’ve all migrated to new places and some just stayed on Twitter. I admit I miss the #Twitterstorians group we had. arxiv.org/abs/24 [bsky, 5 points, 0 comments]
- Anyway, here's a brand new preprint conflating academics' migration from Twitter with their migration to Mastodon and largely ignoring Bluesky. [bsky, 4 points, 2 comments]
- The Failed Migration of Academic Twitter 🧪 arxiv.org/abs/2406.04005 🔓 #preprint [bsky, 3 points, 1 comments]
- Our paper on social media platform migration is accepted to @icwsm.bsky.social Check it out, talk with us in LA, and let us know what you think! arxiv.org/abs/2406.04005 [bsky, 2 points, 1 comments]
- An article from last summer that already feels like another age: "The Failed Migration of Academic Twitter" https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.04005 [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- #toread #paper The failed migration of academic Twitter: A case study of precocious adopters by Xinyu Wang, Sai Koneru, Sarah Rajtmajer http://arxiv.org/abs/2406.04005v3 [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- 😞 arxiv.org/abs/2406.04005 [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
- # arXiv The Failed Migration of Academic Twitter https:// arxiv.org/abs/2406.04005 tracking the posting activity of academics on Mastodon over a one year period. After an initial surge of enthusiasm, [mastodon, 0 points, 2 comments]
- via Hacker News: The Failed Migration of Academic Twitter L: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.04005 C: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40627808 posted on 2024.06.09 at 17:33:36 (c=0, p=4) orig http [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]
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