Following change 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. 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 as most users did not maintain their activity levels, and those who did faced lower levels of engagement compared to Twitter. Our findings highlight the challenges involved in transitioning professional communities to decentralized platforms, emphasizing the need for focusing on migrating social connections for long-term user engagement.

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[–] oce@jlai.lu 19 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I have the same issue with Reddit, there's a middle size good quality subreddit about my specific job which is the best place on the internet to see news and discussions about it in one place. It helps me increase and test my knowledge a lot.

[–] TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 10 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Is there such a community here? Maybe you could start one.

[–] Marsupial@quokk.au 15 points 2 months ago (2 children)

I tried that. No one ever really joined. I tried posting content, and no one ever engaged with it.

Guess theres not many childcare educators on Lemmy as the reddit community is always super active.

[–] evulhotdog@lemmy.world 4 points 2 months ago

I honestly wouldn’t expect to see a lot of that, being that in my anecdotal evidence the majority of K-12 educators would likely fall under a more generalized population, than what lemmy currently is, which is generally very technical and STEM oriented.

All the other subs on Reddit didn’t exist until general population got pulled in with memes, and started partaking in communities there. Lemmy is just like Reddit was, when Reddit was young.

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 3 points 2 months ago

Did you try promoting it on !newcommunities@lemmy.world and !parenting@lemmy.world ?

[–] oce@jlai.lu 1 points 2 months ago

Yes there is, but very little subscribers and no activity. I think it's too niche to have the required critcal size with the current size of the Lemmy user base.

[–] pandapoo@sh.itjust.works 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

News, tech, left-wing politics, memes, anime, and porn are Lemmy's biggest community types.

I know a lot of different subtopics fit under each, and I'm sure I left a few top level subjects out, but my point is that there are a lot of mid-sized, and especially smaller (by Reddit standards), subreddits that Lemmy is no where near being remotely useful as a replacement for yet.

I have community subreddit collections that I don't see Lemmy replacing anytime soon. I mean, I hope they do. I still check every so often, and yes, communities for them exist and they have maybe a few dozen users, but not enough to even try to just suck it up and deal.