Flocking to Mastodon: Tracking the Great Twitter Migration
J. X. He, Haris Bin Zia, Ignacio Castro, Aravindh Raman, Nishanth Sastry, Gareth Tyson
Abstract
The acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk has spurred controversy and uncertainty among Twitter users. The move raised both praise and concerns, particularly regarding Musk's views on free speech. As a result, a large number of Twitter users have looked for alternatives to Twitter. Mastodon, a decentralized micro-blogging social network, has attracted the attention of many users and the general media. In this paper, we analyze the migration of 136,009 users from Twitter to Mastodon. We inspect the impact that this has on the wider Mastodon ecosystem, particularly in terms of user-driven pressure towards centralization. We further explore factors that influence users to migrate, highlighting the effect of users' social networks. Finally, we inspect the behavior of individual users, showing how they utilize both Twitter and Mastodon in parallel. We find a clear difference in the topics discussed on the two platforms. This leads us to build classifiers to explore if migration is predictable. Through feature analysis, we find that the content of tweets as well as the number of URLs, the number of likes, and the length of tweets are effective metrics for the prediction of user migration.