Where Are All the Americans? Fediverse Adoption and the Missing US Crowd

Spend enough time poking around Mastodon instances, looking at who runs the bigger ActivityPub servers, or reading about governments experimenting with decentralized social media, and a pattern starts to show up. A surprising amount of the interesting activity has happened outside the United States. Japan, Germany, India, and even China come up again and again in the history of the fediverse. American institutions, meanwhile, have mostly watched from the sidelines while Silicon Valley platforms grew larger and more centralized. I went looking for academic research to see whether that impression holds up. The answer is: maybe, but the research I found does not really answer the question I was asking. Two studies from Arizona State University looked closely at migration away from Twitter. One focused on the Twitter-to-Mastodon exodus after Musk’s takeover. A later study looked at migration to Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads at the same time. Both examined who left Twitter, why they left,…