People say capitalism is efficient, yet Twitter has around 5,OOO employees while Mastodon was built pretty much single handedly by Eugene Rochko. Today, Mastodon provides a strictly superior user experience with only a handful of contributors.
Majority of effort at Twitter is directed towards things like ads and tracking that are actively harmful from user perspective. Meanwhile, the core functionality of the platform that benefits the users can be implemented with a small fraction of the effort.
Seems to me that capitalism is actually far more inefficient than open source development in practice.
I find the UI is a lot snappier than Twitter. I like the fact that you can have more than 200 char posts, but it truncates them so you expand for more. I like the way sensitive content works. I find the default column layout to be really convenient. I have a few hashtags pinned and it’s easy to follow them. I also like the fact that you can customize notifications so you only see replies and follows. I find that likes/retoots are just noise. Also, since Mastodon uses ActivityPub I can follow people from other services. For example, I follow some photography accounts from Pixelfed, and it might eventually allow me to follow Lemmy posts as well. These are just a few things off top of my head.