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The Failed Migration of Academic Twitter
L: arxiv.org/abs/2406.04005
C: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4
posted on 2024.06.09 at 17:33:36 (c=0, p=4)

arXiv.orgThe Failed Migration of Academic TwitterFollowing changes in Twitter's ownership and subsequent changes to content moderation policies, many in academia looked to move their discourse elsewhere and migration to Mastodon was pursued by some. Our study looks at the dynamics of this migration. Utilizing publicly available user account data, we track the posting activity of academics on Mastodon over a one year period. We also gathered follower-followee relationships to map internal networks, finding that the subset of academics who engaged in migration were well-connected. However, this strong internal connectivity was insufficient to prevent users from returning to Twitter/X. Our analyses reveal significant challenges sustaining user engagement on Mastodon due to its decentralized structure as well as competition from other platforms such as Bluesky and Threads. The movement lost momentum after an initial surge of enthusiasm where the main network was fully established as most users did not maintain their activity levels, and those who did faced lower levels of engagement. Our findings highlight the challenges involved in transitioning professional communities to decentralized platforms, emphasizing the need for focus on community building for long-term user engagement.
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Jorge Stolfi

@hkrn

Mastodon is a well-intentioned but half-baked idea, poorly implemented. It is fun, but not an effective communication medium.

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jakob 🇦🇹 ✅

@JorgeStolfi @hkrn

Ever tried friendica or other services from the fediverse?

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Jorge Stolfi

@jakob @hkrn

That is one of the problems of the fediverse: its is fragmented into many more or less incompatible platforms. Few users have the time to check out more than one, or migrate between them.

The fediverse itself is a half-baked idea, poorly implemented. The old USENET worked because it had a much better overall design.

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jakob 🇦🇹 ✅

@JorgeStolfi @hkrn

In this paper i searched for
- peertube
- castopod
- friendica
- misskey
- calkey

Not one occurance.

The fediverse is in first reading a protocol, which connects all the different services.

And yes, it's work in progress.

If you are looking for one polished interface... living in front of one service owned by one billionaire... you are wrong in fediverse.

But... if you never tried the other services from this network, if you ignore it constantly and only look on mastodon... write about mastodon... a service, that ignores standards from the fediverse... (i call mastodon "the microsoft of the fediverse") then you don't know the network and it's magic.

Yes, there can be some kind of polishing in thf protocol, on some of the services, some UI/UX... but it is free from surveillance-capitalistic billionaire-owned companies, which only try to show you MORE ADVERTISINGS.

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Jorge Stolfi

@jakob @hkrn

It is not just the user interface, it is the very basic design of the fediverse.

One of the annoying features is that the same post shows up again and again in my feed, every time someone I follow boosts it. The old USENET avoided that by keeping track - in my local machine - of the messages I had already seen. Like any email server does. But the fediverse cannot do that, because it cannot keep such memory anywhere...

Jorge Stolfi

@jakob @hkrn

And another fundamental flaw is that there is no standard message format. Each flavor of fediverse implement its own markup language (or not) and defines its own semantics for it. Thus one cannot in principle write a message in one flavor that would be properly readable in other flavors...

Jun 09, 2024, 11:57 PM·Public·Web
0boosts·0favorites
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jakob 🇦🇹 ✅

@JorgeStolfi @hkrn

Indeed, this is a problem. But the services are working on.
But still there, mastodon does it's own thing. So other services have to bend over mastodons bad behaviour.

No subject... mastodon only implrmented the note type, but not the article type of message.
Mastodon uses also note type for direct/privste message, but there is sn extra type of messagd for this defined in ghe ptotocol, and other serviced use this for dn/pn. Not so mastodon... it uses the same type for all...

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