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.
The best we can do with current tools is just trying to tie multiple platforms/views together I think. Programming.dev runs a bunch of different services under the same umbrella like that, and I’ve setup something similar on bestiver.se / xxxiver.se
I think having communities that consist of a group of fediverse services like that are probably the way forward in the short term. I kinda want to package that up as a ‘Verse as a Service sort of thing, but I’m still not sure if anybody will be willing to pay for it.
Definitely interesting idea (I hadn’t really quite seen it formalised like this)! I’ve kinda had vague similar-ish thoughts along these lines too.
Any chance you’d be willing to go into any more detail, or point to specifics? I’m not familiar with what’s going on over on bestiver or programming.dev in the way of service-type things.
