Because a rich man recently bought Twitter, because he felt some people were managing to avoid what he says. Some people think that it would be nice to find somewhere else to hang out
Yeah, those people don't actually try to avoid what the rich man says - they wouldn't have anything to be upset about otherwise. I mean, join Mastodon and see what's trending on Fediverse - it's the constant "rich man did this", "rich man did that", non stop, ad nauseam, for months now.
No, it's about a whole beehive of drama queens who thought Twitter is their domain, who saw their hated rich man prove them wrong by literally buying it from under them.
One enormous consequence of how social media globalization works is that the attention span of the whole world becomes centralised. We can only talk about one thing or a few things at a time. Those become the hyper focus of the whole internet. In every forum those topics seep in. Trying to resist "the current thing" becomes very exhausting. It's very hard to even talk about local issues when there are a few big issues that draws everyone's attention. I feel like this is one of the most dramatic changes for the last two decennia.
I see your point. At the same time, - imho - it is exciting to see how we might witness the beginning of an eruption in the established social media landscape.
Musk has been running around being the Internet's favorite clown for the last ~10 days and is causing massive disruption. Mastodon is the twitter competitor, and as a federated product has a bunch of independent uncoordinated cheerleaders.
And because it's federated, it will never work in any of the ways they are pissed off at Elon for changing in Twitter. You just can't make stuff like this up - it's amazing to watch!
What's hilarious is they are mad *their* walled garden collapsed.
Fleeing to a federated service isn't going to help them build a new walled garden - watching them figure that out has been very entertaining, to say the least.