Elon Musk announced that “the bird has been released” when its $44 billion acquisition of Twitter officially closed on October 27. Some users on the microblogging platform saw this as a reason to leave.
Over the next 48 hours, I saw countless announcements on my Twitter feed from people either leaving the platform or preparing to leave. The hashtags #GoodbyeTwitter, #TwitterMigration and #Mastodon were trending. Decentralized, open-source social network Mastodon gained over 100,000 users in just a few days, according to a user-counting bot.
As an information scientist who studies online communities, this felt like the beginning of something I’ve seen before. Social media platforms tend not to last forever. Depending on your age and online habits, there’s probably a platform you’re missing, even if it still exists in some form. Think MySpace, LiveJournal, Google+ and Vine.
When social media platforms go down, sometimes the online communities that have made their homes there disappear, and sometimes they pack their bags and move to a new home. The turmoil on Twitter is causing many of the company’s users to consider leaving the platform. Research into previous migrations of social media platforms shows what can await cage-flying Twitter users.
A few years ago, I led a research project with Brianna Dym, now at the University of Maine, where we mapped the platform migrations of nearly 2,000 people over a period of nearly two decades. The community we looked at was transformative fans, fans of literary and popular culture series and franchises who create art using those characters and settings.
We chose it because it is a large community that has flourished in a number of different spaces online. Some of the same people write Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfiction on Usenet in the 1990s were being written Harry Potter fanfiction on LiveJournal in the 2000s and Star Wars fanfiction on Tumblr in the 2010s.
By asking participants about their experiences moving across these platforms—why they left, why they joined, and the challenges they faced in doing so—we gained insight into the factors that can drive platforms’ success and failure, as well as the consequences. possible negatives. happen to a community when it moves.
‘You go first’
No matter how many people eventually decide to leave Twitter, or even how many people do so at the same time, building a community on another platform is an uphill battle. These migrations are largely driven by network effects, meaning that the value of a new platform depends on who else is there.
In the critical early stages of the migration, people need to coordinate with each other to encourage contribution to the new platform, which is really hard to do. It basically becomes, as one of our participants described it, a “game of chicken” where no one wants to leave until their friends leave and no one wants to be the first for fear of being left alone in a new place.
For this reason, the “death” of a platform—whether from controversy, unpopular change, or competition—tends to be a slow, gradual process. One participant described the decline of Usenet as “like watching a mall slowly go out of business.”
What comes next?
The current push from some corners to leave Twitter reminded me a bit of Tumblr’s adult content ban in 2018, which reminded me of LiveJournal’s policy changes and new ownership in 2007. People who left LiveJournal in favor of other platforms like Tumblr, described feeling unwelcome there. And although Musk didn’t walk into Twitter headquarters in late October and flip a virtual content moderation lever to the “off” position, there was an uptick in hate speech on the platform as some users felt emboldened to violate the policies. of platform content under an assumption that major policy changes were on the way.
So what might actually happen if too many Twitter users decide to leave? What makes Twitter Twitter isn’t the technology, it’s the particular configuration of interactions that take place there. And there’s basically zero chance that Twitter, as it exists now, can be rebuilt on another platform. Any migration will likely face many of the challenges that previous platform migrations have faced: content loss, fragmented communities, broken social networks, and shifting community norms.
But Twitter isn’t a community, it’s a collection of many communities, each with its own norms and motivations. Some communities may be able to migrate more successfully than others. So maybe K-Pop Twitter can coordinate a move on Tumblr. I’ve seen a lot of Akademik Twitter coordinating a move to Mastodon. Other communities may already exist simultaneously on Discord servers and subreddits and may simply let Twitter participation die out as fewer people pay attention. But as our study implies, migrations always come at a cost, and even for the smallest communities, some people will be lost along the way.
For anyone wondering, Mastodon got over 70k registrations just yesterday. Let’s keep the momentum going! The “public square” of the Internet should not belong to any person or corporation!
— Mastodon (@joinmastodon) October 30, 2022
The links that bind
Our research also pointed to design recommendations for supporting migration and how one platform can benefit from breaking from another platform. Cross-posting features can be important because many people hedge their bets. They may not be willing to cut ties completely right away, but they can dip their toes into a new platform by sharing the same content on both.
Ways to import networks from another platform also help maintain communities. For example, there are many ways to find people you follow on Twitter at Mastodon. Even simple welcome messages, guides for newcomers and easy ways to find other migrants can make a difference in helping resettlement efforts.
And through it all, it’s important to remember that this is such a hard problem by design. Platforms have no incentive to help users leave. As longtime tech journalist Cory Doctorow recently wrote, it’s “a hostage situation.” Social media entices people with their friends, and then the threat of losing those social networks keeps people on the platforms.
But even if there is a price to pay for leaving a platform, communities can be incredibly resilient. Like the LiveJournal users in our study who found each other again on Tumblr, your fate is not tied to that of Twitter.
Casey Fiesler is Associate Professor of Information Science, University of Colorado Boulder.
This article first appeared on The Conversation.
