The Network of Alternative Social Media Researchers

Researcher Interview: Nate Tkacz

Blake Hallinan, 02 Oct 2025

In this ASM researcher interview, Blake Hallinan talks to Nate Tkacz. Nate Tkacz is a Professor of Digital Media and Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London. His broad interest is in understanding how digital technologies produce or (re)shape culture and society. His recent book Being with Data: The Dashboarding of Everyday Life was published by Polity in 2023. Blake and Nate’s conversation focused on Tkacz’s 2025 article “Eventful migration: Rethinking social media migration with help from Elon Musk’s sink,” co-authored with Carlos Cámara-Menoyo and Fangzhou Zhang.

In your recent article, you discuss social media migration (SMM). What is it?

Thanks for the chance to discuss our new article. It was a long time coming and we’re happy to see it out in the world!

There are two ways to answer your first question – one easy, one hard! In simple terms, social media migration refers to populations of users who move from one site, platform or service to another. But once you get into the details, things can get messy. The existing literature has quite a lot to say about this, for example, by differentiating between “account migration” and “attention migration,” or by describing migration as something a user might attempt multiple times as an ongoing process.

So we can ask, what counts as “moving”? Or we can ask, how many users need to migrate for there to be “a migration”? What we were interested in thinking through was a slightly meta question: What is happening when a migration is happening? Specific migrations can teach us many things about a particular platform as they are a kind of rupture from the everyday of social media - they are a bit like a breaching experiment in that regard. New things become visible. Although we focus on one migration, it really made us think about this more general question of SMM. 

What can these migrations teach us about digital cultures?

I think there are a few takeaways. First, is that we perhaps place too much attention on the power of platforms and platform companies without recognising its contingency and constitution. Migration brings into existence a semi-coherent user collective with the capacity to make or break platforms and their “platform power.” Users are not often thought about explicitly in terms of politics - since the term connotes a technical figure using a product or service - but we need to think about them more in this way. What kind of political formation is a migration of users? How is it brought into being? These are some of things we were interested in and wanted to explore.  

You develop a theory of “eventful” migration. How does this relate to prior ways of studying social media migration? 

In the article, we offer a brief historical discussion of what is often call “push-pull factors” research. It comes from historical migration studies, that is, from geographical migration studies rather than digital/platform studies. I won’t rehash the discussion, but one of the things we wanted to do was to get beyond that framework for understanding migration.

The inspiration for our research was the Twitter-Mastodon migration, which forced us to think about migration in terms of events. Migrations have typically been analysed in terms of their spatiality; they are mapped, and then people try to understand how or why a movement A went to B, for example. Thinking in terms of events adds a strong temporal dimension to the analysis. There is still a spatial movement to consider, of course, but adding the temporal unfolding of an event helps us to understand different things about how migrations happen and how we might see them beyond their spatiality.

You focus on the migration from Twitter to Mastodon in late 2022 and early 2023 and bring together a really interesting mix of evidence in your analysis, including survey responses, trace data, and public commentary. How did you go about researching this migration and how did the different sources of data shape your understanding of the event?

This is a great question! The truth is, as with much research, we didn’t really know what we were looking at when we started out. We were following the developments at Twitter and we were doing a few things with our Masters students to study what we were calling Twitter’s “dynamics of decline.” When the migration started to become highly visible, we knew we wanted to study it.

Carlos [Cámara-Menoyo], who’s the Mastodon enthusiast, was really interested in studying how the migration might alter the social dynamics on Mastodon. He wanted to know more about who was migrating and how the new folks compared to existing users. I was a bit more interested in the disaster unfolding at Twitter and what the repercussions of that might be for the wider social media sphere.

Carlos put together a survey, focusing on Mastodon users. The questions were exploratory and more wide ranging than we ended up using in the actual article, but they helped us narrow our focus. For example, one question was very much in the tradition of “motivations” research (as in, “what motivated you to migrate?”). I was looking at the results and thinking, this is obviously all about the same thing! We needed to think them together, and this pushed us away from that kind of approach and more in the direction of a single event. 

The account analysis was our way of empirically mapping the migration. Other people were also doing this, but at the time it was important for us to get our own sense of the reality of it. This allowed us to give a small snapshot of the migration, with really specific dates of people signing up to Mastodon, and we then mapped that onto the Musk takeover. This helped us to explore the migration’s eventfulness and its temporal dynamics. It also helped us to get a sense of what users were doing on both Twitter and Mastodon post-migration. We used the public commentaries and high-profile tweets to flesh out other aspects of our eventful theory, such as the “critical voice” section. We decided not to use any posted content from the users who migrated, so using celebrity accounts and relying on secondary sources was our alternative.

Given the blog’s focus on alternative social media (ASM), what does the case of the Twitter-Mastodon migration mean for our understanding of the role of alternative social media in the broader platform ecology?

For one, ASM is bound up with the fate of larger commercial platforms. You used the word “ecology” – we can draw on the biological definition of this term a bit more strongly than we might otherwise. We saw how the spectacular demise of Twitter had a huge impact on Mastodon. It also helped give rise to new actors or “species” (Bluesky, Threads) which has further altered the ecology and posed different sets of challenges (often to do with protocols). We tried to get at some of this in our discussion of “terrain transformation.” It’s our way of thinking about the effects of a migration beyond the movement of users. 

But we’ve also seen that the fate of other platforms doesn’t determine the fate of ASM. With the hindsight of a few years, we can see that Mastodon’s numbers grew but not exponentially, and they have since settled. One could interpret the existence of Mastodon and other fediverse applications as a kind of “pressure valve” or as a “back up,” but this is a bit unfair. It’s a perspective that places the commercial platforms as the main actors, which might be true in a broader sense, but not for the fediverse and its communities of users.

I’ve seen several decades of web cultures grappling with the question of alternatives, from indymedia to peer production. One thing about Mastodon is that it doesn’t need to serve a greater purpose. We don’t need it to speak “truth to power,” as news alternatives might. If the users across their instances find it enjoyable and worthwhile, maybe that’s enough. On the other hand, maybe the fediverse can continue to show that another digital world is possible and there are many ways of organising sociality.

In the conclusion, which I would have happily read more of if journal word counts weren’t so strict, you introduce the idea of “user power.” What does it mean to think of social media migration as user power and what other forms might user power take in the present moment? 

Thanks for bringing this up. We had to work very hard to get this article down to a submittable length and it meant that we couldn’t fully explore the notion of “user power.” I’ve been fascinated by the figure of the user for some years. Users are written about exhaustively in some fields - mostly around design, UI, UX, and some STS - but are barely mentioned in areas where I think they should be front and centre, such as cultural studies, or in politics.

In the current article, we suggest that SMM is a form of user power; that it makes visible this sleeping giant of users, who could easily end a platform’s existence if they chose to, or if they were pushed too far. We are very good at identifying the latest forms of “power of the powerful” - from algorithmic power to surveillance capitalism - but we’re perhaps not as good at thinking about new manifestation of counter-power. A lot of work still focuses on everyday resistances, novel use, and so on, in the tradition of De Certeau. And I have to say I’m a fan of this work and see myself as part of this tradition. But I think we also need to think about our new social arrangements, and the capacities of where and how we dwell. To flip Raymond William’s phrase, we could say “there are users, we just need new ways of seeing them.”

Do you have plans for any future social media migration studies? Or are there any threads you would like to see other researchers pick up? 

I suspect this is a “one and done” scenario in terms of migration studies! Fangzhou [Zhang] is busy researching superapps and Carlos has a new project on Open Street Map. I have just finished an article with Rob Gehl, called “After Twitter,” which is in some ways a follow-on piece.

In terms of threads to pick up, my interest is not directly with migration, and so I wouldn’t necessarily encourage everyone to start studying them. I’m always looking for things that will help us understand aspects of digital culture that aren’t immediately apparent or are becoming newly visible and interpretable. What I’m really interested in is how the fediverse and open-source productivity tools are being used in relation to the question of digital sovereignty.

If anyone else in the ASM network is also interested in this, feel free to reach out! And thanks so much for reading the article closely and engaging with it.