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.
As in a new one would be necessary to do the sorts of things I’m suggesting … or the current moment requires a sort of rebranding and pivot that is best served by a new platform?
Both of those reasons are valid. I think a lot of people are noticing general difficulties and lack of seamless interoperability between the platform types, which definitely makes it hard to choose where is the most opportune place to be on. If there is a platform that does it better, I bet people will start to notice.
Yea … I suspect it’s a protocol problem more than any one platform, because there’s just too much flexibility in the protocol and so any inter-platform transfer is necessarily noisy. Multiplied by the number of platforms, and you get quite a bit of noise.
To your point though, a new platform that kinda does it all on its own could likely take off quite well and then set a new de facto standard around how to do things. Bonfire seemed to be that, and may still be. AFAIU, they’re trying to solve performance issues right now before properly opening up.
Could be, but I kind of feel like the protocol might be close enough and that it just needs the right implementation. I think Kbin almost had it, but just needed more refinement.
I’m definitely excited for bonfire though, seem like it’s got tons of potential!