> Fairly high profile people like Neil Gaiman

Who?

I have to say, that doesn't sound remotely convincing to the 220M+ daily users of Twitter who continue to use the platform since there was no 'mass exodus'.

It was more like a leaf falling out of a tree.

* * *

Right, but that's where absolute and relative come into play.

200k new users per week is... what, 0.05% - 0.1% of Twitter active user base?

Not saying one day it might not snowball, but it's been 6 months and I wouldn't call Mastodon an existential threat to Twitter just yet. I am tremendously enjoying and schadenfreuding the twitter melodrama, but even most people making fun of twitter/musk/socialnetworks, seem to be doing it on twitter.

My mastodon timeline has been growing pretty rapidly over the last year. With obvious ratcheting up happening whenever elon steps on yet another rake. 'Let that sink in' nearly doubled the amount of posts per day, 'hardcore mode' another, 'api shutdown' another...

Still seems to be tweeting on Twitter: https://twitter.com/neilhimself

Many people double-post right now. Though since twitter effectively killed it's API that basically gutted a bunch of tools that would automate that for you. Though maybe you could post to twitter and have a tool that is just plain webscraping your home timeline and reposting....

It looks like neil does quite a bit of boosting (retweeting) on masto: https://mastodon.social/@neilhimself