The failed migration of academic Twitter

The largest issue with the fediverse is that so few people seem to understand what it actually is. Even this paper talks about Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads as if they’re mutually independent. They kind of are, but that misses the point of what the fediverse is meant to be.

I am part of a public mastodon server and the academic migration was like watching people discover what it was like to “surf the web” again. This paper generally rings true to my experience. In my view, this particular failure of fediverse adoption was because there was a large group of people who were using immature technology for the wrong reasons, and the friction of their incorrect mental models outlasted their righteous indignation about Twitter/X.

If you haven’t taken a gander through the fediverse yet, give it a try. It’s beautiful and weird the way the internet was in the days of geocities. But it can take some digging - my best results have been in finding people who are running custom, non-mastodon servers.

My take on this is; back in the day when Facebook and to the extent Twitter were dominating so called "social media", being on Facebook or Twitter meant that you were actually connected with all the people who wanted to be a part of social Web. But today, social networking is so fragmented with dozens of social sites, mobile apps, fediverse networks and who knows what that I think, we are actually going back to the time of decentralized and distributed internet forums where people would gather in small communities and connect with each other, which is not necessarily bad because all the power is not concentrated in Facebook and Twitter but then again all the interesting people are not in the one place but in the 10 different places hence Zuckerberg stating that Facebook started as a directory of people which was meant to centralize all people and their connections in one place.

Content discovery on Mastodon can be daunting, especially if you are a busy academic who doesn't have the resources to stay connected on what's happening all day long. That's why we created Murmel - a service that does all the checking for you and delivers it to your inbox in a compact daily email. I can't wait to see more peoples reaction when they finally get hold of their day: http://murmel.social

Entropy. Takes too much effort to change, far less effort to stay, especially since most of the doom-and-gloom predictions proved to unrealized.

You have better chance of getting a car driver to adopt public transit.

The academic Imposters with Elon derangement syndrome left Twitter, making it better and Mastodon worse?

Mastodon becomes the place to be to know how to make ethics committee minutes inclusive and Twitter is where the real science anarchy is?

I think sacrificing Mastodon is worth it. There is still Bluesky

I don't think there is much in this paper to get insights from?

Personally I think Mastodon's reader UX is it's biggest failure. Lol, I just went to https://mastodon.social to do a search for an example and search is login-walled off. Could they make it any harder?

There’s a kind of insufferable harridan who thinks that Elon Musk is Satan incarnate, but when they migrated to Mastodon, not only did nobody want to follow them, but rather appreciated their absence.

Yes. This isn't because the alternatives aren't cool or useful, or even that Twitter is suddenly bad.

It's because virtue-signaling trends fade quickly, which is all this mass migration was.

Twitter has always been ridden with 'non-technical problems' like moderation, tribalism, and people complaining that it used to be better.

Also moats outlive trends.