"The acquisition of Twitter (now X) by Elon Musk in 2022 generated concerns among Twitter users regarding changes in the platform's direction, prompting a migration campaign by some user groups to the federated network Mastodon.

This study reviews the onboarding of users to this decentralised platform between 2016 and 2022 and analyses the migration of 19,000 users who identified themselves as supporters of the platform switch."

https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17563