I think people need to understand that Twitter is not a major driver of traffic for most news organizations.

The reason why news organizations are on twitter is because reporters and editors are on it, and it's useful as a tool to get in touch with certain types of folks.

News orgs can leave twitter because it's not critical for them.

(see https://www.niemanlab.org/2016/04/twitter-has-outsized-influence-but-it-doesnt-drive-much-traffic-for-most-news-orgs-a-new-report-says/ )

The more i use Mastodon with friends & family on my personal instance, the more i want features from @darius's hometown (https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown ). I have been doing a lot of "Direct messages" (which aren't really DMs) instead, which feels unfortunate, and cutting against the notion of building a local community.