RAPID: Documenting and understanding large-scale migrations between social media platforms

Although social networking sites employ many features to discourage users from moving between platforms, users still migrate to new platforms following sudden changes to rules, designs, and incentives. Since October 2022, alternative social networking sites like Mastodon, an open-source, decentralized micro-blogging service, have received hundreds of thousands of new users. The scale and speed of this migration provide a unique opportunity to understand the motivations to migrate between social networks, to identify the challenges of sudden platform migrations, and to preserve important information from the migration. Surveys, interviews, and archived content will provide time-sensitive data to inform reporting, research, and design related to sudden platform migrations and develop research methods for analyzing decentralized social media. Understanding the drivers of platform migrations and the challenges of re-creating communities on a new platform are important for ensuring that online “public squares” can remain resilient and inclusive spaces for connection, deliberation, and organizing. This project will use quantitative and qualitative methods to characterize the socio-technical mechanisms underpinning the 2022 migration. The first data collection effort will survey users to understand their motivations and challenges with migrating, cross-posting, or remaining. The second data collection effort will interview stakeholders like moderators and software developers to understand their values, priorities, and challenges for governing social platforms facing rapid migrations. The third data collection effort will archive digital traces of content documenting onboarding, socialization, and conflicts illustrating the tensions and challenges associated with the migration. The resources and findings developed by this project will be shared via regular blog posts, a public archive, and peer-reviewed manuscripts. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.