[getoffmyyawn]

I don't really understand what you mean by 'challenging twitter' in this context. Why does the number of DAU matter? In what way are Mastodon and Twitter competing? Twitter is a business that needs to make money to survive. Mastodon is a federated network of services run by individuals and groups under a variety of arrangements.

I've been on Twitter since the first year. I watched it grow and change for the good and bad. I find I use mastodon far more these days. Pretty much daily. Why? The people I want to interact with are on Mastodon discussing the topics I want to discuss.

For me there is simply no comparison anymore. Mastodon wins hands down because: 1. signal to noise ratio is 1000x better and 2. the responses to my posts are high quality, faster, and 10x more than I get on Twitter (where I have 10x the followers).