Mastodon is better anyway. I deleted Twitter ages ago when Musk took over. It's amazing how many people have stayed there despite how much he's shit all over the userbase. He makes Spez look like a saint.
Mastodon might be "better" but it's in a completely different league if it's missing 99% people I actually care about following on twitter. On mastodon the feed is just random people talking about their personal stuff and misusing hashtags, and usually when you bring this up the answer is "well duh, mastodon is not supposed to be twitter, it is its own thing".
Agreed. There's a lot mixed messaging from the userbase where we're recommended to switch to Mastodon from Twitter but also respect that Mastodon is not supposed to be a Twitter replacement.
It may not be a Twitter replacement, but perhaps it can still fulfill whatever specific needs they're currently fulfilling using Twitter.
I'm not the best person to judge since I never really "got" Twitter in the first place, but the basic function of "announcing a small piece of text to the world" is shared by a whole lot of different platforms.
it's missing 99% people I actually care about following on twitter
This is what's stopping me from really giving Mastodon a shot. Nobody that I care about uses it, except for a few bot accounts that are just mirroring that user's existing Twitter feed, and they're not even monitoring those accounts on Mastodon so trying to interact with them is fruitless.
Mastodon feels a bit like Twitter back when it was still new, and no celebs or influencers existed. If you had 5k followers or more, you were a big shot.