Eventful migration: Rethinking social media migration with help from Elon Musk’s sink

29 de junio de 2025·
Nathaniel Tkacz
Nathaniel Tkacz
Carlos Cámara-Menoyo
Carlos Cámara-Menoyo
,
Fangzhou Zang
· 0 min de lectura
Image credit: Unsplash
Resumen
Using the 2022 Twitter to Mastodon migration as a case study, this article contributes a new understanding of social media migration (SMM). It begins with a review of existing studies of SMM, showing how migration is often understood as a combination of ‘push and pull factors’. We suggest a need to widen the conceptual scope for how we approach SMM in ways that more directly tie such movements to specific questions of power, agency and events that ripple through digital cultures. Drawing on social media account analysis, a survey of recently migrated Mastodon users, content from high-profile Twitter users and other media commentaries, we re-present the migration in order to detail our ‘eventful’ theory of migration. Eventful social media migration is comprised of five elements: an initial X factor; the emergence of a critical voice; a collective platform consciousness; an observable migration; and a wider terrain transformation.
Tipo
Publicación
New Media & Society
publications
Alternative Social Media Mastodon X Twitter
Nathaniel Tkacz
Autores
Nathaniel Tkacz
Professor, Associate Co-Head of the Department
Nate Tkacz is a Professor of Digital Media and Culture. His broad interest is in understanding how digital technologies produce or (re)shape culture and society. He has approached this interest in a number of ways, for example, through a study of how digital networks change the conditions of knowledge production (through studies of Wikipedia or dashboard interfaces), or through studies of how apps transform our relationship to money and finance (banking apps), or governance and health (covid apps). His research aims to combine critical and technical understandings of media with creative methodological approaches.
Carlos Cámara-Menoyo
Autores
Carlos Cámara-Menoyo (he/him)
Senior Research Software Engineer

Soy una persona versátil, transdisciplinaria y apasionada, con una formación híbrida que combina lo técnico y lo sociológico: he trabajado como arquitecto, desarrollador de Drupal, gestor de proyectos, docente, investigador y científico de datos, realizando tareas de procesamiento y visualización de datos con R y trabajando con datos geoespaciales mediante QGIS.

Mis intereses de investigación se enmarcan en los estudios urbanos y, más concretamente, en las dinámicas de mercantilización que surgen de la interacción entre ciudades, tecnología y sociedad. Hasta la fecha, me he centrado en las desigualdades sociales y espaciales con el fin de hallar vías para lograr ciudades más sostenibles e igualitarias, mejorando así el bienestar de las personas.