What’s interesting is that it’s doing fine so far; existing users are being really helpful and welcoming to the newbs. It’s actually a really pleasant place to be compared to Twitter. (It might be helping that everybody leaving Twitter is leaving Twitter for the same reason.)

Septembers happen.

Septembers demolish communities.

Some more than others, but most certainly not all.

Where this one falls for Mastodon remains to be seen. It's more AOLish than Academic, in the sense that it's the result of a capricious event on a large outside-the-destination-system network (Twitter, in this case) rather than a regular seasonal influx (as with uni students discovering Usenet). It isn't however a wholesale dumping of an entire community onto another though as was the case for AOL in 1993.

Mastodon's adoption for at least the past six years has tended to be driven by failures and frustrations with other platforms, and Twitter in particular. Those seem to be occurring in increasing waves. There's some grumbling and adjustment with each, but so far, knock wood, Mastodon's assimilated the influx fairly well.

Yep, I hope it continues working.

It's worth noting that whilst the present migration is still in process, the magnitude is approximately 1/6 of extant profiles. That's more Academic than AOL scale.

At the time of the September that Never Ended, Usenet was ~1m total users (based on data from John Quarterman's The Matrix (1990) citing DEC researcher Brian Reid, which I've referenced in earlier HN comments). I believe AOL at the time was at least of an equivalent magnitude, if not several times this.

That sounds right.