Many users are considering leaving Twitter after the arrival of Elon Musk. And what would be his new destiny? A study shows that migrations from one platform to another often involve very high costs
When Elon Musk announced that “the bird is free” after closing Twitter’s $44,000 million purchase, some users of the platform understood it was time to fly away.
Over the next 48 hours, I saw numerous announcements on my Twitter account of people leaving the platform or preparing to do so. The hashtags #GoodbyeTwitter, #TwitterMigration and #Mastodon were trending. The open-source, decentralized social network Mastodon gained more than 100,000 users in just a few days, according to a bot that counts users.
As an information scientist who studies online communities, these movements seemed like the start of something I’d seen before. Social media platforms usually don’t last forever. Depending on our age and our online habits, there is probably a platform that we are missing, even if it still exists in some form. Think of MySpace, LiveJournal, Google+ and Vine.
When online platforms decline, sometimes the online communities that made their homes there disappear, and sometimes they pack up and move to a new home. The turmoil on Twitter is causing many of the company’s users to consider leaving the platform. A study of past social media platform migrations reveals what awaits Twitter users falling from the sky.
Several years ago, I led a research project with Brianna Dym, now at the University of Maine, in which we mapped the platform migrations of nearly 2,000 people over a period of nearly two decades. The community we surveyed was transformational fandom, fans of popular culture and literary series and franchises who create art using the original characters and settings of the works that follow.
We chose it because it is a large community that has done well in several online spaces. Some of the people who wrote Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan stories on Usenet in the 1990s were the same people who wrote Harry Potter stories on LiveJournal in the 2000s and Star Wars on Tumblr in the 2010s.
By asking participants about their experiences moving from one platform to another – why they left one, why they joined another, and the challenges they faced – we gained insight into factors that drive success and failure of platforms, as well as the likely negative impacts on a community when it moves.
No matter how many people eventually decide to leave Twitter, and even how many at the same time, building a community on another platform is an uphill battle. These migrations are largely driven by network effects, meaning the value of a new platform depends on who else is out there.
In the critical early stages of the migration, people have to coordinate to promote the new platform, which is really hard to do. Essentially, as one of our participants described, it becomes a game where nobody wants to leave until their friends are gone, and nobody wants to be first for fear of being alone in a new space.
For this reason, the “death” of a platform – whether from controversy, unwanted change or competition – is often a slow and gradual process. One participant described Usenet’s demise as “watching a mall slowly close”.
So what could happen if many Twitter users decide to leave? What makes Twitter Twitter is not the technology, but the specific configuration of the interactions that take place there. And the chance that Twitter as it exists today can be reconstituted on another platform is nil.
Any new migration will likely face many of the same challenges that previous platform migrations have faced: loss of content, fragmented communities, broken social networks, and altered community norms.
But Twitter is not a community, but a collection of many communities, each with its own rules and motivations. Some communities may migrate more successfully than others. So maybe K-Pop Twitter can coordinate a move to Tumblr. I’ve seen many of the academic Twitter coordinate a move to Mastodon. Other communities may already exist on Discord at the same time and just let Twitter’s engagement fade away the less people pay attention to it. But as our study indicates, migration always comes at a price, and even in the smallest of communities, some people will get lost along the way.
Our research also pointed to design recommendations to support migration and how one platform can take advantage of another platform’s depletion. Cross-posting features can be important as many people hedge all their bets this way. They may not be willing to cut ties all at once, but they can dive into a new platform that shares the same content on both.
Importing networks from another platform also helps to maintain communities. For example, there are multiple ways to find the people you follow on Twitter on Mastodon. Simple welcome messages, guides for newcomers and easy ways to find other migrants can make a difference in helping the resettlement efforts continue.
It is important to remember that this is a complex problem by design. The platforms do not intend to help users leave. As veteran tech journalist Cory Doctorow recently wrote, this is “hostage”. Social media draws people to their friends, and then the threat of losing those friendship networks keeps people on the platforms.
Even if there is a price to pay for leaving a platform, communities can be incredibly resilient. LiveJournal users in our survey met again on Tumblr. Our fate is not tied to Twitter’s.
This article was published in ‘The conversation‘.
Source: La Verdad
I’m Wayne Wickman, a professional journalist and author for Today Times Live. My specialty is covering global news and current events, offering readers a unique perspective on the world’s most pressing issues. I’m passionate about storytelling and helping people stay informed on the goings-on of our planet.
