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.
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.
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.
Kind of the same problem with Linux desktop in general and all other sub categories. Freedom equals to mess. I’m fine with that, but most people are not. Most people don’t care about freedom, as the cost is too high for them (not in terms of price), which shows in results like these.
From a UX perspective federation has been absolutely bungled. Twitters greatest trick was to cause an exodus before the alternatives had reached maturity, though I imagine the demand has pushed them further than they would be otherwise.
IMO BlueSky is by far the best Twitter replacement, insofar as you can just use it like Twitter but it is built on an open protocol, allowing you to run your own server if you wish but with zero interoperability friction or worrying about servers on the actual client. Also it has already started basic bridging between threads and mastadon, its custom feeds in place of algorithms is genius and stackable moderation is the most compelling solution I’ve seen to the core complaints and concerns over modern social media.
And it’s independent, transparent and run by intelligent, passionate people. And, very importantly, Jack Dorsey has nothing to do with it!
I definitely agree Bluesky is the best alternative right now. It feels like twitter used to, but with much better moderation and no Dorsey (or Musk). And I love things like Aegis, and Feeds.
Threads’ algorithm is extremely aggressive and just viewing a single post will send your entire feed into reccs for that kind of thing. It constantly refreshes, making discovery and finding things extremely difficult. And it’s just Instagram-y. It’s not about building community, it’s just there for throwaway “content.”
But I do agree that Bluesky is doing federation in a way that simplifies it for the users. Non-tech users can just be there and don’t even have to think about it. In fact, most people there (at least across my feeds) have no idea what Federation even is or means. If others want to federate or hang somewhere else and have the knowledge to do that, they can. So they make it much more frictionless.
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.
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.
