I was on Twitter for five years and I ended up with 8,000 followers.

I've been on Mastodon for five months, and I already have 16,000 on here.

I think the biggest difference is that Mastodon just leaves me alone to do whatever I feel like doing, whereas Twitter would go out of its way to punch me in the head anytime I tried to enjoy the platform.

Many scholars are leaving Twitter for #Mastodon, a public, decentralized alternative, impervious to private take-over:

https://www.science.org/content/article/musk-reshapes-twitter-academics-ponder-taking-flight

Scholarly organizations are already supporting this migration:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00486-3

and

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7643817

There are analogous solutions for another public good in private hands: journals. There are even levers the scholarly community could pull to incentivize an analogous migration:

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5526634

What are we waiting for?