Elon Musk said that the bird is liberated after the formal closing of his 44 billion US dollars acquisition of Twitter. This led several users of the microblogging platform to leave the platform. In the following 48 hours, a ton of postings on Twitter feed portrayed users who were either quitting the site or getting ready to do so. Trending hashtags included #GoodbyeTwitter, #Mastodon, and #TwitterMigration.
The open-source, decentralized social network Mastodon gained over 100,000 users in a short period of time. This felt like the start of something many had already seen. Platforms for social media don’t typically stay forever. Based on an individual’s age and internet habits, even if a platform is still around in some capacity, they probably miss it. When social media networks collapse, online groups that have established themselves there can either die away or move to a new location.
Moving to a new platform
Many of Twitter’s users are considering leaving the service as a result of the upheaval at the company.No matter how many users finally choose to leave Twitter, or even how many do so at the same time, building a network on another site will be difficult. Network effects, or the idea that the worth of a new platform relies upon who else is there, are a major driving force behind these migrations.
People must work together to promote participation on the new platform during the crucial initial stages of migration, which is extremely difficult to do. It essentially turns into a game of chicken, where nobody wants to go until their friends do, and nobody wants to be the first out of anxiety of being left alone in a strange area. Because of this, the death of a forum brought on by a scandal, an unpopular change, or rivalry—tends to be a protracted process.
Even though Elon Musk did not enter Twitter’s headquarters towards the end of October and physically switch the content moderation lever to “off,” there was an increase in hate speech on the site as some users felt empowered to break the site’s content guidelines under the impression that significant policy changes were imminent. What would actually occur if many Twitter users actually decide to stop using the service?
A collection of communities
Twitter’s unique configuration of interactions, not its underlying technology, is what makes it so popular. And there is practically no chance that Twitter could be recreated on another platform in its current form. Any platform move is likely to encounter many of the issues that earlier platform changes did, including split communities, content loss, altered community norms, and harmful social networks.
Twitter, however, is a collection of various communities, each with its own set of goals and standards. It’s possible that some cultures can move more successfully as compared to others. As fewer individuals pay attention to Twitter, other groups that already exist simultaneously on subreddits and Discord servers might just let engagement there dwindle away.Â
