Only a handful of Twitter users who have threatened to leave the social network for open-source alternative Mastodon have actually deleted their Twitter accounts.
An analysis of more than 140,000 Twitter users shows that although plenty of people have said they are leaving the site, only 1.6 per cent have wholly abandoned the platform, which was bought by entrepreneur Elon Musk in late October.
“I’m not hugely surprised, because I’m one of those people that still posts on both,” says at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, who did the work with Haris Bin Zia and at Queen Mary University of London. Tyson believes that some “thought leaders” immediately jumped onto Mastodon, but most users are “laggards” who would require a certain percentage of their followers or the people they follow to move to Mastodon, or another site, in order to jump too.
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Castro says one concern Twitter users might have about deactivating their accounts is that their usernames could be picked up by impersonators on Twitter.
To get the data, the researchers tracked 1.9 million tweets that contain phrases or hashtags that suggest the user is thinking of abandoning Twitter – such as #ByeByeTwitter or #RIPTwitter. They then analysed the Twitter users’ profiles to see if they had posted a corresponding Mastodon username. Around two-thirds of Twitter users signed up to Mastodon with the same username.
The people were spread across more than 3000 different “instances”, or servers, on Mastodon. Unlike Twitter, whose servers are controlled centrally by the company, Mastodon relies on a federated approach, where individuals or organisations set up a server that can host users.
Users on different servers can interact in the same way that someone with a Hotmail email address can send a message to someone with a Gmail account, but there have been incidences where entire Mastodon servers are blocked by others.
There was a small spike in the number of users who posted their Mastodon username on Twitter in an attempt to port over their audience to the new platform in the days after Musk announced he had bought Twitter on 27 October. Around 30,000 users posted a Mastodon link on 28 October.
However, the number of tweets doing this spiked three weeks later at nearly 120,000 on 18 November – the day that Twitter staff began leaving of their own volition after being asked to subscribe to a new, .
The large numbers of people posting links to their Mastodon profiles coincided with the #RIPTwitter hashtag trending as users appeared to fear for the immediate future of the platform. Despite several bugs arising on Twitter as a result of big job losses among software engineers, the platform seems to be continuing to function relatively normally and the number of daily tweets has broadly stayed the same since Musk’s takeover.
An analysis by Social Blade, a commercial analytics company, forecasts that Musk Twitter’s most-followed user in mid-January 2023.
“A lot of people have said they’re quitting Twitter,” says at University College London. “There has been an increase in users on Mastodon, but it’s unclear if they’re actually active users or just created an account and messed around a bit.”
Bin Zia says the researchers are still collecting data and hope to investigate how many new Mastodon users maintain their accounts.
