It's like this is the 21st century version of the San Francisco story where Yung refused to sell their house to the robber baron Cocker, leading Cocker to build an expensive three story tall fence around the house forcing Yung to move.
Elon jet is alive and well over there.
It currently had 41k followers, and 2.5k likes on the post about it being banned on Twitter.
Comparatively, Elon's most recently Twitter post ("Twitter right now is <four fire emoticons>") has 186k likes.
It seems very unlikely the "great exodus" is happening or likely to happen due to this, at least to Mastodon.
For example: Despite wanting to, it took me a month and half to migrate to Mastodon, for a variety of personal, irrelevant reasons. And I'm a techie. But now I'm there, I've unfollowed large amounts of people on Twitter, and am phasing it down entirely.
In the mean time, Mastodon gained magnitudes of users. Servers previously running fine are now overloaded. Services are shutting down to new signups left and right because they're overwhelmed.
When this happens, people notice. You should know: you're in a community composed of the kind of people who make their millions noticing trends like these and quickly jumping on them. This means more resources go into these trends, and it becomes like a wave: Every few weeks, there's a new large influx of people.
Every new "round" of this exodus, servers will be more ready, there will be more services, the social graph will be larger, and more people will be convinced.
Will Mastodon ever be larger than Twitter? No idea. It's definitely possible, but knowing in advance is not.
I can say one thing: I'm glad people are taking notice of the importance of decentralized social graphs again. It's nice to see, for once, an open source protocol growing organically and winning hearts and minds.