Twitter suspended our Open Data project's account and wiped all our followers

I think you are thinking of Mastodon primarily as a technical platform. I am thinking of it primarily as a social environment.

When I was active on Metafilter, there was a new social platform all the members were talking about. It was invitation only. I was homeless at the time and I was generally treated pretty badly by most members there. Nonetheless, someone gave me an invitation and I joined. And it was pointless because what few people I did recognize were people with a track record of treating me terribly.

If people have little walled gardens, but are hesitant for any reason to admit me to their inner circle, then there's no there there for me.

Sure, I can figure out the technical details, if I have reason to. But I don't have sufficient connection to have reason to. Walled gardens serve an inner circle of people. I don't belong to any inner circle that are using Mastodon.

Perhaps that will change. But it won't likely change by joining Mastodon. It might change by somehow becoming an insider somewhere with a group that already uses and prefers the platform.

1. To start with the end, nobody's suggesting they're exclusively on Mastodon (which is not the only Fediverse tool, there are others), and they absolutely should syndicate far and wide. However, posting to Mastodon/Pleroma/Whatever first and syndicating the content elsewhere means that if this happens again, they don't lose tweets.

2. Drawing from a pool 300x bigger doesn't make for 300x better interactions. Generally Fediverse SNR seems to be better, but this is more or less so depending upon interest and representation. Bear in mind OP's twitter account had followers in the hundreds, like my Mastodon account does. I have thousands on twitter, but I only interact with maybe 50-100 people there.

3. WRT your friend, there's now https://joinmastodon.org/, which will guide them to an instance. Your friend is not required to use Mastodon to participate in the Fediverse. There are other tools out there. They're all linked (you can use Pleroma and read Mastodon toots for example). The whole point of the fediverse is that it isn't a walled garden and that you own your content.

4. There are tools to assist with migrating Mastodon accounts but they're early stage. I agree this sucks, but in it's defence it's because Mastodon is new and expanding and the tools are improving.

5. This was the bit I wanted to talk about:

> it's been very hard for me to discover people to follow

Yup. I completely agree. The solution however is right under your nose. The way to find people to follow in the Fediverse is:

1. Search for hashtags you're interested in.

2. Find people using those hashtags and check out their feeds.

3. Look at who they follow and check those people out.

This is how every social network pretty much used to work, and fundamentally is down to the fact that in the fediverse you own your presence, your data and your network which means you are responsible for it. There's nobody pushing for engagement, nobody making money from filling your feed with ads. The price is personal responsibility.

If you think that's too high a price to pay, that's fine. Stay in the walled garden with curated content and risk having all the content you produced for corporations for free so they could sell ads to be pushed to you and your friends erased at the drop of a hat without explanation.

And you can say it'll never work, it'll never replace twitter or facebook. But HN will never replace Reddit and Lobsters will never replace HN, yet both are doing pretty well for the communities they serve. Once you bend your head around the concept that fediverse communities as a whole have no interest in replicating Twitter or Facebook it starts to make a lot more sense.

For now, I strongly recommend that you establish an account at mastodon.social. It's the instance with the most users and therefore has the most local content to follow and the widest possible reach.