If you really want to help Mastodon take off, I highly recommend committing to exclusively posting here, even if only for a week. Set your bird site username/bio to your mastodon handle and announce you'll be switching to Mastodon for some time. It's really hard to get a feel for the platform when you're just crossposting from the other place. After switching over, if found Mastodon to be far better, and plenty of people followed me over here.