@futurebird
I'm not using twitter/mastodon commercially, so i don't want to come down to hard on people who are worried for their income.
But i've had similar experiences re followers: it grows pretty fast when you write some toots and follow some people.
At Twitter i had to build from scratch, but here i could start by following a few dozen other accounts from the twexodus, who alerted me to other cool accounts, etc etc.
There will always be some people who somehow 'hacked' the twitter-algoritm to perfection and won't find the same succes on mastodon. But i think that most people will find the mastodon-experience equal to or even better than Twitter.