[carapace]

Whenever you hear the words "efficient" or "inefficient" you should always have in the fore of your mind the question "For what goal?" or in other words "By what metric?"

A lot can hide in the unspoken assumptions behind the unqualified use of the idea of efficiency.

In this case the comparison of "efficiency" of Twitter vs. Mastodon is pretty meaningless. There are as many goals as there are users and moderators and (in Twitter's case) management and investors, eh? Of course, there are broad groupings and shared interests, but by and large the folks using Twitter and/or Mastodon have different goals.

It reminds me of comparisons between industrial farming and small-scale ecological farming: industrial farming is more efficient at creating massive amounts of some kinds of products, but it literally cannot produce any of some other kinds of products. (E.g. you can't get Alpine strawberries in the supermarket because they start to lose structural integrity the very moment you pick them. The only way to get them is to grow them close to your kitchen.)

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As a bit of a tangent, I like to reflect how evolution has no goals therefore speaking of the efficiency of living systems is meaningless. Evolution is a chemical tautology.