Mastodon generates more engagement than Twitter. Why?

1. Mastodon is disproportionately a self-selected group of very active social media users. The people who cared the most about the state of Twitter were most likely to care enough to leave Twitter.

2. Twitter has a much higher number of fake and bot accounts.

3. Twitter is much older and thus has a lot more accounts that have been abandoned or are relatively inactive, whereas Mastodon has seen a recent, large influx of new users and thus has a higher proportion of currently active accounts. Also, anyone with a longstanding Twitter account has probably collected a lot of followers and followings over the years who they no longer care much about.

4. Mastodon has attracted specific subsets of the Twitter population, rather than attracting broadly from the general Twitter population. For example, I've seen that software developers have migrated en masse. Thus, there tends to be more activity, because you have a relatively large collection of like-minded or like-interested users. It doesn't feel "lonelier" on Mastodon despite the overall vastly smaller user base when the people you know all happen to be on Mastodon. In fact, my Twitter feed is now a pretty lonely place.

5. As a result of all of the above, Mastodon users feel more comfortable posting and replying. More people you know and like, fewer people you don't know and don't like, not many "drive-by attacks". And Mastodon has technical limitations preventing a lot of the typical Twitter nastiness: no global search, no quote tweets, etc.

6. There are a lot of famous people or entities on Twitter, and a lot of Twitter users are there to passively follow the tweets of those famous people or entities. Whereas there aren't many famous people or entities on Mastodon, and people are generally there for the purpose of interacting rather than for passively following.

Overall, Mastodon now is somewhat similar to how Twitter was during its early days, before all of the ultra-famous people joined. Smaller, cozier. Like Cheers, where everybody knows your name, and they're always glad... sorry.

The evidence for this is https://www.caseywatts.com/blog/welcome-to-mastodon/ which is completely vacuous: a single person for an unspecified period measuring unspecified 'engagement' with a round number and no mention of how many followers cannibalized from Twitter or how a migration produces tons of fodder for discussion (eg the entire post is an advertisement/explainer for Mastodon) or about the general decline in Mastodon traffic post-exodus bump. Maybe establish that there is anything there before trying to explain as the will of the omnipotent Algorithm...

I think mostly it is because people join servers that basically cater specifically to them.

For example, I'm on infosec.exchange. Needless to say, it is very easy for me to engage in conversations, and very easy for others to engage with me. In threads where people don't agree with each other, it still manages to not get hostile because well, we're all interested in the same subject even if from different angles.

Also, an important feature when it comes to people who might get out of hand on occasion, is that you can ignore (mute) and/or block them for a specified period of time (versus Twitter's permanent-only options). I do that when people post the songs they are listening to in real time, because I figure they'll be done the song list in an hour or so.

The great thing about Mastodon seems to be that it's bad for promoting.

Several journalists, researchers, and bloggers jumped into Mastodon and tried to do the usual "hot take every day" to get followers. It does not work. There is no vitality. Pumping hot air does not take off. They are really pissed that "retweet" feature is missing :)

I have discovered several people and groups of experts who just do their work, discuss and share knowledge without branding themselves.

Simply, the Twitter algorithm is designed to require you to put in 10x the content to get seen. Since Twitter controls which tweets get seen, they naturally steer them to the tweets that cause users to stick around. On Mastodon, there is no algorithm; your feed is the tweets of the accounts you followed, period. (Okay, there are plenty of other options but they all appear to be non-algorithmic.)

So the folks who post 100 times a day are probably getting less, but your average person who posts once a day or month is probably getting more. Infinity more, because Twitter simply does not show tweets from average users at all.

Because it's smaller and has a self selected user base

If you engage in Twitter, and it’s even borderline controversial, you get dogpiled.

Also, it’s super public, so if you say something non-mainline you’ll get fired

It only makes sense to say anything on Twitter if you have nothing to lose, or profit from controversy.

I read, but I am never brave enough to talk or respond on Twitter.

Twitter engagements are super aggressive too, like even helping people with code snippets you get some bullshitter who sucks at coding but has 10,000 followers come in and railroad you

I think the main reason is that the people who use Mastodon tend to use it as a community to talk to like minded people, whereas the ones on the likes of Twitter see it as a free self promotion tool. And the people who follow you there also tend to post a lot too.

Hence more engagement.

Whether this lasts if influencers and corporations get into the Fediverse... well that's to be seen, but I suspect it'll probably resemble Twitter a bit more in that case.

I value a Toot more than a Tweet. I can’t be alone.

This was already observed at least 2 years ago https://boilingsteam.com/mastodon-vs-twitter/

People follow more users on twitter, see more tweets, so they'll engage less with every individual tweet.