There’s a lot of inertia to a social network and Twitter had high mindshare in some key groups: journalists, celebrities, politicians, authors, academics, musicians, government agencies, etc. A lot of people use Twitter _less_ than they used to but still come back, especially for things like local news or a major event like the wars in Ukraine or Israel.

I do think the criticism of Mastodon is wrong, related to the previous point. It’s not that it’s hostile to non-tech folks but that it has the usual problems of a decentralized system: if you join, you will likely have problems finding people to follow. That’s no longer as hard as it used to be but I think that’s the strongest thing pulling people back to Twitter. It also seems to be softening as more people join Mastodon / Threads, and some organizations are putting out official servers because X has reminded them of the benefits of controlling their own presence where they can be absolutely certain their posts will not be displayed with literal Nazi ads.