My @Downes account on Twitter attracted peaked at 9700 followers and stayed there (plus or minus 25 or so) for several years (I always wondered what would change when I hit 10,000 but I never found out). My Mastodon followers number one tenth of that. For people who depend on large numbers of followers, like (say) newspaper columnists, Mastodon was never going to replace Twitter. And as Jon Udell suggests in this article, their published articles reflect that bias. But for people who "just want to hang out online with people whose words and pictures and ideas intrigue and inspire and delight," the Mastodon experience is a refreshing alternative to Twitter. For now, at least - I'm already seeing signs of hashtag spam and pump and dump marketing and self-promotion happening on Mastodon. It's not yet clear the decentralized social network can be tailored to minimize that. But at least there's a possibility; on Twitter, we never had a chance.
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