you're here, and your old blog is about tech stuff, so there's a decent chance you follow a lot of tech people. there are plenty of _those_ on mastodon, because tech people will suffer through bad UX if the product has certain qualities that that community values (federation being the big one in this case)

that doesn't hold for other groups. people that don't want to think about internet application protocols (most people) throw up their hands and leave at the first notion of needing to choose an instance or needing a JS bookmarklet to follow someone not on your instance

plenty of those people are experts in their field and write interesting content i wouldn't otherwise encounter, but they aren't migrating to mastodon because of that, and there's a decent chance they won't migrate anywhere and will return to sharing their work in niche walled garden academic journals and conferences

sure, mastodon maybe keeps out the garbage firstnamelastname9023285023 accounts that do nothing but send low-content replies and retweet inane celebrity(s' social media managers') posts, but it's keeping them out because only a very specific population will bother to get in, which is a bad filter