I keep seeing articles about Mastodon slumps, and journalists going back to Twitter. Is it fair to say, that maybe Mastodon isn't for journalists, or brands, or even people who want large accounts? Maybe Mastodon is true social media, for people who want to interact and discuss, not be influenced, sold to, or manipulated with cult style tactics and followings. There will always be groups who dislike the idea of the people controlling their own inputs, people who don't like the idea of accessible Administration, and people who don't like the idea that if we don't like a space that we can just move to another one, or even create our own. Individualism is scary to the kind of people who thrive on complacency, and not challenging the status quo.

@RickiTarr "Mastodon isn't for journalists, or brands, or even people who want large accounts?"

How you use Mastodon is up to you. But I want to use the free software and services model to challenge this right wing takeover of media and social media.

That mean attracting professional journalists. And activists. And lawyers. And any others who seek to restore liberal democracy.

That's just me.

@ParanoidFactoid That's actually a good point, #NotAllJournalists, that's the power of open source, you can make it what you want, I'm more speaking about corporate interests trying to get involved where they don't belong and people trying to change established instances to become just like Twitter. This isn't Twitter, but I support anyone trying to speak truth to power.

@ParanoidFactoid @RickiTarr there are already people with seriously large follower counts on Mastodon. Stephen Fry springs to mind.
But people forget how long it took them to build followings on Twitter, and it is impossible to switch followers from one to the other.

However, with time and effort your follower count certainly does grow.

@peterbrown @RickiTarr If you had something of a following on Twitter, some of them migrate over and follow here too.