When Elon Musk took over Twitter back in 2022, lots of people were unhappy. Some moved over to other platforms, like Mastodon.

"This mass exodus from Twitter represents one of the largest digital migrations in the history of the Social Web," write researchers Lucio La Cava and Andrea Tagarelli (University of Calabria), and Luca Maria Aiello (IT University of Copenhagen) in their research paper exploring the phenomenon.

Now, make no mistake, X, as Twitter is now known, is still alive and with many, many users. Nevertheless, some communities have shown a higher tendency to move over to other platforms.

So, what prompted some communities to move? The researchers looked to some 75,000 X users who migrated to Mastodon to find out. They learned that communities that tended to "migrate" had certain things in common.

📢 Their users talked a lot about their commitment to migrate

⭕ Their users tended to have fewer social connections. The researchers suggest that the message to migrate is more diluted for users with a large number of connections and/or that simply, the fewer connections someone has, the greater the fraction of connections migrating.

🤝 There was a greater emphasis on shared identity and a higher tendency to share factual knowledge within the community.

There's still a lot we don't know. Are all those users who migrated as active (or not) on Mastodon as they were on X, for example. And what about those who moved to other platforms? Would we see the same commonalities in those communities?

Curious to know more?

Read the open access research Cava, L. L., Aiello, L. M., & Tagarelli, A. (2023). Drivers of social influence in the Twitter migration to Mastodon. Scientific Reports, 13(1), 21626. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-48200K-7