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

Transgender women and transfeminine nonbinary people (transfems) rely on social media for community and critical resources that are rare offline. However, transfems face perpetual risks of those communities suddenly turning hostile or transphobic, forcing withdrawal and losing those resources. To investigate, we conducted a two-stage asynchronous remote communities (ARC) study with 27 total participants, drawn from transfeminine-heavy online communities. We found that transfems forced off crucial platforms by transphobic hostility experience digital solastalgia, distress caused by observing a platform’s character significantly erode over time. Moreover, through visual elicitation, we found that transfems perceive characteristics of locality and space in their online communities. These factors shape transfems’ disengagement strategies and community structures. Informed by this, we develop community-sourced design guidance for designers and admins on building robust online platforms that can better protect transfeminine communities, and investigate the transferable effects of these suggestions to other marginalized groups, such as disabled users.