Mastodon doesn't by design, so they're gonna have a much, much harder time there.

In theory, yes. But what early switching folks are reporting is that the total impressions are much lower on Mastodon, but the total engagement is much higher, for the same effort.

Which is confusing unless we factor in what we know about Twitter farming bot account on purpose to create a false appearance of success.

Of course, there's still the matter of Twitter genuinely has orders of magnitude more users. So as an either/or proposition, no way does it, yet, make sense to ditch Twitter for Mastodon.

But for the value-to-reach ratio, with the same effort applied to both, anyway, Mastodon is actually already a better value than Twitter.

All that to say, yeah, Twitter is better, purely due to the user base, and Mastodon's algorithm actually treats creators better. Which we kind of already knew, as it was created by people fed up with Twitters abusive algorithms.

Mastodon doesn't by design

There is a trending section, and it does boost popular tags based on user interaction. It doesn't shovel crap into personal feeds like traditional social media, but it's not entirely lacking discovery features either.