Study on the Twitter Migration

Last year’s Twitter migration, where a large number of people decided to move to Mastodon, is an example of a giant collective behavioural change that people engaged in voluntarily. A new paper takes a look at how the collective coordination happened, and what can be learned as the drivers of such a collective action.

The authors (Lucia La Cava, Luca Maria Aiello, Andrea Tagarelli) show that Twitter communities migrated more quickly where:

• The social connections in the community are relatively sparse. There is a cost to severing a social connection, and in a tight-knit community the social cost of leaving is higher.
• Community members repeatedly post about their migration plans. The more people post with the #twittermigration hashtag, the more likely people are to follow up on the call.
• Language use that emphasises a shared identity and the exchanges factual knowledge. Cooperation in a community can be facilitated when discussions and conversations create a sense of belonging to the group.

The blog post explaining the research can be found here, the paper here.

#Twittermigration

fediversereport.com/study-on-t…

Get Out of the Nest! Drivers of social influence in the Twitter migration to Mastodon

Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter on October 2022 triggered a mass exodus to Mastodon, the largest decentralized online social network.

^{Luca Maria Aiello (Springer Nature)}