Moral Entrepreneurs of the Mastodon Migration

Social media platforms are imbued with politics and values through an interplay of coded architectures, platform policies, economic models, and algorithmic curation, together shaping and shaped by the activities of users. This dynamic set of relations is most evident during moments of disruption, in which platform politics and values come under debate. We examine one such case of disruption through a mixed methods analysis of post-Musk Twitter, tracking the mass user migration from Twitter to Mastodon—an alternative platform distinguished by its federated servers and decentralization. Observed through the lens of symbolic interaction, Twitter and Mastodon are mediated moral enterprises, with migrating users acting as moral entrepreneurs who make claims through both words and actions about how social media platforms ought (and ought not) operate. At the intersection of symbolic interaction and social media studies, we theorize mediated moral enterprise as a tripartite process of idealization, materialization, and actualization, documenting these interrelated elements in the Mastodon migration. This work offers a twofold contribution, elucidating the conditions of a platform disruption while expanding and adapting theories of moral enterprise and moral entrepreneurship for platform-mediated contexts.