A Mastodon Migration From Bluesky Would Be Different

Image credit

Cartoon by Hilda Bastian, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

The Mastodon migration from Twitter in 2022 was massive for the non-commercial community network: The number of accounts swelled with more than 3 million new users. I’m one of them, and I’ve stayed very active. Mastodon, and the open social web it’s part of – the “Fediverse” – is by far my favorite-ever social media network. But most of the newcomers stopped using their accounts – or opened one and never really used it.

There’s a decent body of research now that maps and analyzes what happened during and after the 2022 migration, and why. I’ve collected 14 of them (here). Those studies point to some reasons to expect any migration from Bluesky to be smoother and “stickier.”

Let’s look at some context first. Mastodon is smaller than Bluesky. Monthly active users peaked at over 2.6 million in November 2022. Now, it’s less than 690,000.* That’s still higher than it was in before the migration from Twitter, which has been the consistent pattern for Mastodon. Cory Doctorow called this scalloped growth: “Surge after surge, the number of users steadily builds, despite the normal ebb and flow.”

Meanwhile, Bluesky had over 5.3 million active monthly users last month, and it’s been dropping. Bluesky use peaked in January 2025. Both Bluesky and Mastodon are dwarfed by X (the former Twitter), which claims to have hundreds of millions of active users. (They don’t publish user data.)

The main message from the Mastodon migration studies is that the decision to leave and establish on a new platform is a personal decision. But for most people, it seems to depend on a collective decision to go or stay. There are push, pull, and mooring factors – changes at a platform or the owners’ behavior can push people away, community members who migrate elsewhere can pull on them to follow, and those who stay can moor them in place. Some communities or clusters moved in large measure to Mastodon or Bluesky, but there was fragmentation, too.

Another of the key take-away messages from the Mastodon migration studies of academics, scientists, and journalists is not only that many never did leave Twitter (though they tended to at least reduce their use), but many now straddle more than one platform. In these communities, there are many who now have both Mastodon and Bluesky accounts. Even if they primarily use Bluesky, “migrating” would no longer require them to open an account.

Indeed, many people use a bridge between Mastodon and Bluesky, that enables people on either side to follow their posts, whichever side of the bridge they make them. This is one of the reasons that I believe a major exodus from Bluesky could flow into Mastodon more smoothly than it did in 2022. The learning curve for entering and using Mastodon wouldn’t be as high, especially with the usability improvements Mastodon is steadily making. What’s more, that bridge is being used to develop the Bounce app, ultimately enabling people to move themselves and their follower graph between the two.

The steady evolution of Mastodon’s features and usability is a critical factor. People liked the idea of the open social web in theory, but not so much in practice. That was in part because of the learning curve. Factors like being truly non-commercial and federated come with complications that a centralized service doesn’t have, and financial constraints that can slow down development. (If you’re interested in trying Mastodon out, I’ve just updated my post on shortcuts to getting started here.)

Another part was cultural. Newcomers were often met with unwelcoming gatekeeping, as longer term users who cherished some of their customs tried to impose them on the incoming cohort to the point of policing. They didn’t want Mastodon to be turned into Twitter. The culture clashes gradually settled down, and the new community affected the culture in ways that I think improved Mastodon.

There is opt-in quote-posting, for example, and Mastodon central is no longer a benevolent dictatorship: It’s transitioning into a non-profit community organization. It’s no paradise – no digital group of this size could be – but I hope the next big surge of users will find it more welcoming. Features that are particularly valuable to newcomers are in development, too – like a Mastodon approach to the starter packs that supercharged network formation in Bluesky.

The final major reason I think future migrations may be more successful is the array of user-friendly apps serving Mastodon users. Apps like that were key to Twitter’s evolution and growth, but the company’s attempts to monetize them drove developers away. Mastodon on the other hand, as a non-commercial social enterprise, is enthusiastic about third-party developers. And developers have jumped onboard with a wide array of innovations for users – there are dozens of apps for Mastodon users now.

What about the obstacles that could be a drag on Mastodon adoption? There is a critical feature identified by Radivojevic and colleagues (2025). People with huge followings on Twitter also quickly gained huge followings in some alternative platforms – but Twitter reputation did not automatically translate to a big following on Mastodon. Given their influence on very large numbers of people, that’s a key “pull” feature that may be muted by people underwhelmed by their reach at Mastodon.

Another potential barrier is specific to academia, with implications for Science Twitter and other communities – Altmetrics “credit” for social media activity on scholarly literature. At least some of the activity at X and Bluesky are tallied for this scoring system. However, there are structural reasons to do with user autonomy and privacy at Mastodon that have precluded the surveillance needed to enable this. I haven’t tried to follow this discussion, so I don’t know where this now sits. Personally, I think academia’s addiction to article metrics is the problem, and it would be better if academia quit Altmetrics – or at least ditched including specific platforms that could be influencing journal and academic social media use in socially harmful ways. That’s not likely, of course. <Sigh>

This leaves the “push” factors, and why I came to write this post. The behavior and social harm caused by venture-capitalist-fueled Silicon-Valley-type social media empires has been the impetus for the surges of migration to Mastodon. There has been a familiar path now – an initial thrill-ride, followed by developments that progress from questionable, to odious, to heinous. People talk about Bluesky now as being the way Twitter used to be, before it went down that path. That’s a good analogy, and I also think the odds of Bluesky following Twitter’s path are very high, given the structural similarities. Bluesky is a for-profit group still in the venture-capital honeymoon phase where it doesn’t need major revenue.

There’s been a new feature in my Mastodon feed lately: People who have abandoned Bluesky in protest at various controversial decisions there that don’t bode well. There have been flurries of departures related to trans rights, the treatment of Black users and Blacksky including banning accounts, the response to the Kirk shooting, and now the organized entry of trolling from the US government regime. You can read more about it in these stories and posts, for example, and their headlines say a lot:

• Bluesky’s CEO meltdown: How leadership continues to fail its most marginalized users (Mara-McKay 2025)

• User ban controversy reveals Bluesky’s decentralized aspiration isn’t reality (Sheffield 2025)

• Trump administration’s arrival on Bluesky highlights growing pains for open networks (Kissane 2025)

• Bluesky – Der Traum ist vorbei (Pallenberg 2025) [English translation: Bluesky – The dream is over]

I maintain my account on Bluesky, but the Fediverse – the broad universe around Mastodon – is the only social network I’m optimistic about for the longterm. Pallenberg expresses why very well [my personal translation]:

“I’m going back to the Fediverse. Back to Mastodon. To the nerds, the hobbyists, the idealists. The people who don’t talk about reach, but about relevance. To those who understand that decentralization isn’t nostalgic, it’s the future. That digital sovereignty isn’t a gimmick, it’s a survival strategy.

Yes, the Fediverse is sometimes clunky, nerdy, uncomfortable. But it belongs to us. It’s not over-regulated, not driven by capital, not buggered up by algorithms. It’s what social media once aspired to be: A network of people, not brands.“

My collection of Mastodon migration studies is here, and my Absolutely Maybe posts tagged Mastodon are here, including my shortcuts to giving Mastodon a try.

* My data sources for Mastodon use are here and here.

You can keep up with my work at my newsletter, Living With Evidence. I’m active on Mastodon, @hildabast@mastodon.online, and on Bluesky. My Wikipedia username is also hildabast.

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Disclosures: I joined Mastodon on October 31 in 2022, and had over 7,200 followers there as of writing. My Bluesky account had over 10,200 followers as of writing. I deleted my former Twitter account in November 2024: Followers had peaked a few hundred above 32,000, and I stopped using it for anything other than Mastodon promotion in October 2022. I had a Facebook account for my newsletter, and deleted that. I also briefly had a Threads account I barely used, and I deleted that. I have an account on LinkedIn, where new issues of my newsletter get posted automatically, and I sometimes visit.

Update October 31: Added link to a translation of Pallenberg’s post notified by a reader.

The cartoon is my own (CC BY-NC-ND license). (More cartoons at Statistically Funny.)