There sure is critical mass now, at least for me. Engagement with my posts, especially from strangers, is actually much higher on Mastodon. And I keep seeing others report the same.
This is a recent change though, wasn't the case, for me, a year ago.
It’s pretty funny that people think those journos/activists would even touch the fediverse after they indirectly turned it into twitter for people they got kicked off twitter.
I think you think the fediverse is far more monolithic than it is. Gab is there, so are a bunch of trans activists. Their content don't intersect.
I don't win if you're unfulfilled in friends and content, you don't lose if I have the most followers. Journalism broadcasting and sourcing is a model that might not work in mastodon, but mastodon doesn't have to be a 1-1 mapping of the existing social uses of Twitter
An NYT writer set up "journa.host", got their face flamed off for unleashing a bunch of journalists into a world where there's a strong culture of putting a content warning on your politics, then got further flamed for saying "wow look how many sites block me now" by linking to a "what instances block my instance" site built by Kiwifarms people. And for hosting right-wing journalists under the aegis of "free speech", which a lot of Masto admins are used to seeing as code for "I will do nothing about letting right-wingers emit hate speech, please block my instance". There's also been news articles about this that have more calls for defederating journa.host resulting from decisions to quote Mastodon posts about this without asking for permission, in contravention of the TOS' of the instances those posts were made on.
They would love to turn it into the new Twitter and it is both hilarious and intensely stressful to see the fights over whether this will happen.
I think this was... Tuesday? The past month, and especially the past week has felt like about six hundred years.
It’s a good thing for conversation but a bad thing for the system we all find ourselves in, capitalism. Virality has economic value, so the masses will chase it.
I did some experiments and posted the same content on Twitter and Mastodon. I got 50% more engagement on Mastodon, despite the fact that I have 5 times more followers on Twitter. Engagement per follower was therefore 7.5 higher on Mastodon. This is my academic bubble. In other areas, the numbers will look different, of course. But it shows that your general claim of no engagement is simply wrong.
That's probably why we are seeing a bunch of these "how to use mastodon" posts now, because people are trying to drum up engagement. This one even recommends one specific server.
I encourage everyone to try joining some mastodon server, usually the only cost is your time. But it is a very different social network and people should set their expectations accordingly.
This is a recent change though, wasn't the case, for me, a year ago.