As much as people around these parts despise algorithmic feeds, I suspect an algorithmic feed would’ve worked far better in this situation to feed all academic based content to someone immediately on account creation if they show interest/ follow peers in the field.

This would’ve helped the migration since they most likely don’t know the accounts of the Twitter accounts posting academic content as that was algorithmically fed as well. I’m really doubtful it’s a problem with decentralization, seems to me mastodon had a problem with both not having a critical mass and the content that was there wasn’t easy enough to find.