The Pit Beneath the Town Square: How Digital Solastalgia Affects Platform Migration and Community Structures of Transfeminine Users

Paper Title

The Pit Beneath the Town Square: How Digital Solastalgia Affects Platform Migration and Community Structures of Transfeminine Users

Publication Info

• Topic area: The impact of hostile platform shifts on transfeminine online communities and strategies for their preservation.
• Keywords: digital solastalgia, transfeminine users, platform migration, online communities, social media, moderation, marginalized groups, digital locality, intersectionality, community design.

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: Transfeminine users rely on online platforms for critical resources and community, but face risks of platform hostility due to anthropogenic shifts, leading to community fragmentation and loss.
• Significance: These shifts jeopardize access to vital networks, health information, and social support, which are often irreplaceable offline, causing tangible harm to transfeminine users.
• Motivation and related work: Prior research has explored toxicity escalation, platform spirit, and community migration, but has not adequately addressed the specific experiences of transfeminine users or their strategies to mitigate and adapt to these challenges.

Solution

• Proposed approach: Introduction of the concept of digital solastalgia to describe the grief and distress experienced by transfeminine users when platforms become hostile, coupled with community-sourced design suggestions to support these users.
• Novelty:
  1. Definition and application of digital solastalgia as a framework for understanding marginalized users' responses to hostile platform shifts.
  2. Identification of transfeminine users’ strategies for community preservation, including curation and migration.
  3. Spatially-informed design suggestions for creating resilient online communities.
  4. Preliminary exploration of the transferability of findings to disabled and neurodivergent users.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Conducted a two-stage asynchronous remote communities (ARC) study with 27 participants.
  • Stage 1: Exploratory journaling on experiences with harassment, platform shifts, and ideal community features.
  • Stage 2: Visual elicitation and speculative design tasks to refine insights and propose solutions.
  • Employed constructivist grounded theory for iterative coding and analysis.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Transfeminine users experience digital solastalgia when platforms turn hostile, leading to feelings of grief, loss, and instability.
  • Two main strategies for responding to platform hostility: curation (limiting engagement with harmful areas) and migration (leaving platforms entirely).
  • Visual elicitation revealed users perceive online communities as spatial, with features like "rooms" and "distances" influencing their interactions.
• Advantage over baselines:
  • Offers a novel framework (digital solastalgia) to explain user behaviors and emotional responses to platform shifts.
  • Provides actionable design suggestions grounded in community input, unlike prior work focused on top-down moderation or platform-level analysis.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Study conducted on Discord with transfeminine users and their community members.
  • Visual elicitation and participant feedback validated the spatial metaphors and emotional impacts described.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Limited sample size and participant dropoff due to external events; findings need validation with larger, more diverse populations.
  • Design suggestions require prototyping and testing on live platforms.
  • Further research needed to explore transferability to other marginalized groups, including disabled and non-Western users.

Summary

This paper introduces digital solastalgia to describe the grief transfeminine users feel when online platforms become hostile, disrupting their critical communities. Through a two-stage ARC study, the authors identified strategies like curation and migration that transfeminine users employ to mitigate harm. They propose spatially-informed design suggestions, such as fluid community subdivision and cross-platform mobility, to create more resilient and inclusive online spaces. While the study focuses on transfeminine users, the findings show potential applicability to other marginalized groups, particularly disabled and neurodivergent users. These contributions provide a foundation for designing platforms that better support vulnerable communities.