Ironically the two are only half way competing with each other. There’s two buckets of twitter peeps:
A) People who keep up with specific people, reducing day by day.
B) The for you page peeps. The vast majority of people I know on Twitter including myself are there for the algorithm feeding us memes and content. Specifically the 2016-2021 algorithm.
Considering mastodon doesn’t have any form of FYP/For you it’s really only competing for bucket A which in my experience has reduced by an incredible amount in the past few years and continues to reduce and makes it useless to a large majority of twitter users.
Unfortunately or fortunately twitters algorithm also sucks now so there’s a pretty big market gap here.
When I did use twitter it was for being the fastest way to get news on events developing in real time. George Floyd protests, J6 coup attempt, start of war in Ukraine, etc. And not just national/world news but also local news. I don’t really that type of use fits in to your two buckets and unfortunately I don’t think Mastodon is quite there yet to fulfill this type of thing either, but I definitely think it could with more time and more users. Fuck the influencers and people looking for ‘content’ imo, when people are going to Mastodon with breaking news is when we’ll know twitter is completely dead.
Inefficient how? I don’t use twitter, I never liked twitter being mentioned in the actual news (“a user twitted this, another use twitted that, etc”), but what’s more efficient than opening that stupid app and getting content from people who are in the area where the news is happening?
