In an article on whether Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter will lead to an exodus from the platform, The Atlantic cited a study co-authored by Brianna Dym, a lecturer in the School of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Maine, looking at why fan communities migrated from platforms such as LiveJournal and FanFiction.Net to Tumblr in the early 2010s. The research highlighted that—as with migration in the real world – there are “push” and “pull” factors at play when people decide to jump from one platform to another. Dym spoke with the Atlantic to differentiate Twitter’s current situation from what happened with LiveJournal. “The death knell for LiveJournal had already fallen. With Twitter, it’s different in that, you know, this is the first major disruption in the history of Twitter,” Dym said. For people to really start leaving on a large scale, she predicted, Musk would have to make significant changes that “erode trust in the platform.”
