Re: Well...
I had created a Mastodon account a few years ago but didn't become properly active until early this year. Initially it was mostly techies talking about tech, at least in the circles that I found.
That changed a bit with the first wave around the time that Musk started to signal interest in buying Twitter. There was a sudden influx of people who were interested in art, music, politics, and other non-tech stuff and topics tended to be more diversified. The peaks were about 2000 new signups per hour.
The last two weeks have been truly insane and it's understandable that servers were creaking under the influx of new users. There have been peaks of about 9000 signups per hour and a million new users in the first ten days. Many admins have had to do emergency optimisations because the service had never been battle tested at this level.
But, that's just the tech side. The truly remarkable bit is not the number of people but the type of people that have migrated from Twitter. There were well-known pockets of Twitter where just about anyone in that profession was active. There was EconTwitter, full of economists, or PaleontologyTwitter full of paleontologists, there was TradeLawTwitter etc. etc. In the last two weeks I have seen entire professions move from Twitter to Mastodon. First historians and astronomers, the second week came the economists, trade specialists, lawyers and journalists. People alerting the community who else had now landed on Masto and what their new handle is. #FollowBackFriday is now a thing on Mastodon. Stephen Fry closed his Twitter account and is now on Mastodon.
There are now people who say they see more engagement on their Mastodon feed than on their Twitter feed. Some people run experiments by posting the same thing on both and see which one takes off. So far Mastodon seems to do better than Twitter on that front.
The big problem for Musk is that fewer than 10% of Twitter users was a 'Heavy Tweeter', and were responsible for 90% of all Tweets. Not all Tweeters are equal. That I have left Twitter will not make any difference, that Stephen Fry with his many millions of followers has left Twitter will make a difference. And every country will have their own Stephen Fry, that one person that has a substantial part of the national Twitter population as their audience. If five million people leave Twitter for Mastodon this month but they happen to be a large part of the 'Heavy Tweeters' then Twitter is screwed.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
