The Core

Unconfirmed:

Mastodon

7,053,740 accounts
+9,938 in the last hour
+180,254 in the last day
+502,990 in the last week

In other Twitter news:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/18/23466625/elon-musk-twitter-reinstatement-jordan-peterson-kathy-griffin-babylon-bee

>bots

There are "friendly bots" on Mastodon but you have to subscribe to them.  Most are specialty news aggregators like Tech News Bot which is really good.  I don't know if there are others.

There is a way to move your account from one Masto server to another but I don't know how nor the limitations.

I think I joined Mastodon in 2018, but only after reading a well written and really-really long article that explained all this stuff.  Without that article I would have been lost.  You can tell Masto was made by geeks for geeks, because what the geeks think is simple and easy signup is totally confusing to innocent bystanders.

All that said, once you get signed up it all seems to work.  Somehow.  Lots of good dog and cat pics.  I don't know any of the subtleties of Masto posting so I'm not a power user.

"Of more than 140,000 Twitter users who announced they were moving to Mastodon, just 1.6 per cent have actually quit Elon Musk’s social media platform"

Mastodon: Most people who threatened to quit Twitter haven't moved over | New Scientist

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2349641-most-people-who-threatened-to-quit-twitter-for-mastodon-havent-left/

>sticking

Yeah.  Mastodon is good for talking directly to other users.  The timeline is strictly chronological with no algo based on subject interest other than manual hashtag searches.

Which means Masto kinda sucks for entertainment and newsy stuff.  So for example, on Twitter, I like reading about old Hollywood movies, archaeology and 1960 cult TV shows, and Ukraine war news.  Twitter's algo responds by feeding me more of the same and/or related posts (ie. not just archaeology of Roman Britain, but Bronze age Europe, stone age Americas and on.)  It's entertaining.  You just don't get that with Mastodon and you don't get the critical mass of weirdness on Masto.

"Of more than 140,000 Twitter users who announced they were moving to Mastodon, just 1.6 per cent have actually quit Elon Musk’s social media platform"

Mastodon: Most people who threatened to quit Twitter haven't moved over | New Scientist

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2349641-most-people-who-threatened-to-quit-twitter-for-mastodon-havent-left/

those people overlap the move to Canada people when Agent Orange took the white house. ... they're all talk.

Musk has done something to the mobile web version of Twitter.  Videos no longer play in the web version so no vids of cute kitties pouncing or dogs being dogs or guys robbing a headshop getting beaten with a giant bong.  It's made Twitter unusable on my phone.

I finally looked at the mobile web version of Mastodon on my phone and it looks like it will work just fine.