Ask HN: How many are switching to Mastodon?

But to be honest, Musk is just controlled opposition, don't expect really significant changes from him.

It's amazing that in the professional world, some people still raise an eyebrow if you don't have a Twitter account. It's better to have a dormant one, than none at all in my experience.

After 6 years, my Mastodon account has fewer followers than my Twitter inactive one. It shows that Mastodon is smaller, less active and (if you filter out bots and spam) you start to recognise most of the active people. It's like a small town. But with the passing years, I start to see that as an advantage. It's less stressful, there's not as much FOMO.

I'm currently in the process of setting up a small instance just for close friends and leave behind the mind-numbing daily drama of planetary social media for good.

It has a character limit, it has separated instances on which you really can't subscribe (at least I couldn't a few years back), and it is realtime feed.

So who is the target audience really? Big influential public figures with millions followers? - not possible due to federation

Small thematic communities or specific professionals, not popular with masses? - very problematic due to federations first (all need to get on the same instance), then due to character count (no longform posts by professionals), and real time, so that rare good posts of people you care about are simply lost in the feed.

Even smaller groups of friends? - none of the problems above are blocking, but now the question is why Mastodon specifically, instead of a more usable and friendly chat room in any of the messengers.

What do you mean? You can subscribe to people on different instances.