An Exploration of the Twitter to Mastodon Migration
What we did and why
On the eve of Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in October 2022, he declared “the bird is freed.” In the name of creating “a common digital town square” for the “future of civilization,” Musk’s subsequent actions, like firing the accessibility engineering and ethical AI teams, a botched rollout of a new verification system, and the reinstatement of numerous white supremacists prompted hundreds of thousands of users to change their use of Twitter over the following weeks. Many former Twitter users have since adopted alternative social media platforms, like Mastodon.
While this user migration between competing products is not new or unique to life online, the scale of these movements beginning in late 2022 marked a key moment in the history of online social behavior. Moving quickly to capture empirical evidence of this ephemeral phenomenon, our team of researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder developed a survey instrument to capture (1) motivations and challenges of this platform migration, and (2) perceptions of emerging alternative social media platforms. We chose to focus our attention towards Mastodon in this survey since it was the most commonly mentioned Twitter alternative in Q4 2022 and Q1 2023. However, demonstrating the fluidity of this situation, not one, but two additional micro-blogging alternatives (Bluesky and Threads) have since rapidly gained popularity. We were able to add a section on Bluesky to our survey prior to launching, while Threads had not launched until after we had concluded our data collection.
Our survey ran from May 25 to June 14, 2023. In the three weeks that our survey was open, we recruited via posts to Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky and received well over 2,000 total responses. After removing responses that provided gibberish responses to free response questions or were flagged as probable spam by Qualtrics, we were left with 1,343 responses. The rest of this blog post reports numbers with respect to this sample.
Our survey respondents report that Musk’s takeover of Twitter (and accompanying changes to the platform) drove many users’ platform migration decisions. Despite common narratives that folks only want a safer version of Twitter, the technical and cultural features of Mastodon itself were also a draw for many users. Despite its attractiveness, the particulars of joining Mastodon and discovering relevant people and content was difficult for a large portion of our respondents. Finally, we report widespread differences in perception of both Twitter and Mastodon, with Mastodon being seen as safer, better for protecting privacy, and more in line with personal values, even among respondents that currently use Twitter more than Mastodon.
What we found
Elon Musk’s acquisition and policy changes were the primary catalyst for respondents’ changing use of Twitter and Mastodon.
The majority (70.0%) of respondents to our survey reported that they use Twitter less than they did 12 months prior, with 40.0% reporting that they no longer use Twitter at all. While this decrease in use could be attributed to a number of factors, respondents were particularly alarmed by Elon Musk — 90.0% of respondents cited a dislike of the new ownership as one of the reasons that they now use Twitter less, a sizable difference between the second most selected option (71.8%) that reported dislike of policy changes.
Twitter pushed. Mastodon pulled.
While Musk’s takeover pushed users away from Twitter, Mastodon itself was a draw for many respondents in our survey. Nearly half (41.8%) of those with a Mastodon account joined prior to 2022; however, more than two thirds (68.1%) did not use their accounts regularly until 2022 or later. Though the most popular reason for joining Mastodon was to find an alternative to Twitter (70.9%), the next most popular reasons were liking the idea of federated social media (59.0%), and that Mastodon feels less toxic than other social media (58.1%).
Despite popular narratives that federation “solves problems that most users don’t care about,” it was a salient factor for a majority of our respondents. Among those who reported “looking for an alternative to Twitter” as a reason that they joined Mastodon, an even higher percentage cited liking the idea of federated social media (70.3%). While these results do not generalize to all of Mastodon or the Fediverse, federation is not an afterthought for our respondents. Additionally, the comparative lack of ads on Mastodon was a moderately popular response (46.6%), and is another key point of differentiation from Twitter. Only 23.1% of respondents identified the presence of friends already on Mastodon as a reason to join.
Joining and using Mastodon isn’t always easy.
For a number of our survey respondents, joining Mastodon was more difficult in practice than in theory. Searching for an instance to join was the most commonly selected challenge (39.6%), and the next most popular initial challenge was actually knowing how to join a specific instance (21.1%). While these struggles are far from universal, it is worth exploring what could be done differently to better support newcomers when joining Mastodon.
User experience challenges continued for many respondents once on Mastodon. About half of respondents reported that finding friends or community members from other platforms was a challenge (48.9%). Difficulty finding accounts with similar interests (34.7%) and finding content about news or current events (34.6%) were common challenges as well. Each of these challenges are related to “discoverability” of people and content. While Mastodon instances often eschew friend recommendations and algorithmically ordered timelines to limit the outrage that comes with optimizing for user engagement, users often find these features useful in some respects (or at least notice when they are gone).
Different places with different values.
Our survey respondents view Twitter and Mastodon quite differently. Across all of our respondents we see large differences in value perception between these two micro-blogging platforms.
On average, our respondents were more likely to agree that Mastodon protects privacy, is safe, and is good for society compared to Twitter. Interestingly, these results hold even when filtering on respondents that currently use Twitter more than Mastodon, which might suggest that our respondents find value in this platform pluralism, beyond the utility of Mastodon alone. Among this same group, however, it seems that there are affordances of Twitter that are less readily translatable to the federated landscape as it stands. Respondents who use Twitter more than Mastodon tend to depend on Twitter and report that Twitter helps to keep them informed. One possible explanation for these differences is that many localities use Twitter to communicate emergency alerts, as interconnectedness of the platform has been vital for on the ground information sharing during crises. In the face of Twitter’s deteriorating reliability, certain governments are also considering Mastodon as an alternative.
Explaining our findings
Two prominent theories offer a way to explain these findings — the push-pull-mooring framework and network effects.
The push-pull-mooring framework describes migration as being informed by a combination of factors that make people want to leave a space (pushes), factors that make people want to join a new space (pulls), and factors that make people want to stay (mooring). To our respondents, Musk’s takeover and accompanying policy changes “pushed” users away from Twitter. At the same time, aspects of Mastodon like federation, less toxicity, and fewer ads “pulled” users towards Mastodon.
“Network effects” occur when the value and motivation of adopting a service scales with the number of other adopters. In the context of a social networking site, there are more connections to be made and more potentially interesting or relevant content when there are more people on a site. This was notably not among the most popular reasons that our respondents joined Mastodon, but it was the second most cited reason for continued use of Twitter (29.4%, “it’s a habit” was the most selected at 32.9%). To many in our sample, these network effects helped “moor” users to Twitter, but did not “pull” users to Mastodon.
While our sample may be skewed towards those who felt strongly about changes to Twitter, these results imply that the migration from Twitter to Mastodon was driven less by network effects of following and re-building one’s social graph and instead was governed by other “push” factors. This could be evidence that the network effect-driven “growth hacking” strategies that dominated venture capital-backed platforms through the 2010s may be bumping up against users’ concerns about usability and safety.
Conclusion and what’s next
The social media landscape has changed profoundly since November 2022. Our survey provides early evidence into the motivations and challenges for users who are migrating between platforms. In the context of the migration(s) between Twitter and Mastodon in late 2022 and early 2023, we find that Elon Musk’s acquisition and accompanying changes were a common “push” factor driving users away from Twitter, but there are also features of Mastodon that “pulled” users toward it. Contrary to popular narratives that “users don’t care about federation,” a majority of our respondents named Mastodon’s federated affordances as distinguishing features that “pulled” them towards adoption. Perspectives about Twitter versus Mastodon differ significantly with substantially greater positive attributions made to Mastodon, even among active users of Twitter.
We thank our respondents for their time, attention and thoughtfulness in filling out our survey, and we look forward to sharing additional findings from this work as it progresses.
Further readings
Lots of thoughtful commentary on this ongoing migration from Twitter/X to Mastodon has been written. Check out this interview from Justin Hendrix of Tech Policy Press and Dr. Johnathan Flowers on the obstacles to joining Mastodon, especially for people of color, this piece from Drs. Chris Gilliard and Kishonna Gray on that gives more insights on the costs of leaving Twitter for Black folks in particular, and also check out this piece from tech writer and editor Erin Kissane that gives perspectives from other folks who switched social networking sites on “how should Mastodon be.”
For a brief sample of our theoretical foundations, check out some of the following resources:
- Fiesler, C., & Dym, B. (2020). Moving Across Lands: Online Platform Migration in Fandom Communities. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 4(CSCW1), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1145/3392847
- Hsieh, J.-K., Hsieh, Y.-C., Chiu, H.-C., & Feng, Y.-C. (2012). Post-adoption switching behavior for online service substitutes: A perspective of the push–pull–mooring framework. Computers in Human Behavior, 28(5), 1912–1920. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2012.05.010
- Hou, Avus; Shang, Rong-An; Huang, Chin-Chun; and Wu, Kuo-Long, “The Effects of Push-Pull-Mooring on the Switching Model for Social Network Sites Migration” (2014). PACIS 2014 Proceedings. 64. http://aisel.aisnet.org/pacis2014/64
Acknowledgements
This work is supported by NSF Award #2309485.
