Mastodon has been a huge success last year and I think the success is going to increase even further. After Elon Musk has locked out all prominent Twitter developers most of them quickly switched to Mastodon for their development platform of choice.
This resulted in a plethora of new apps that quickly gained traction on the internet. This leads to a significant increase in the number of news outlets to report about it and bringing more developers onboard.
Developers like Tapbots or Buffer replaced what Twitter had to offer as a platform before Musk’s hostile takeover. It’s those developers that made Twitter nice to use and Mastodon buttons, embeds and references are slowly becoming the standard instead of Twitter’s own tools and widgets.
It’s a chain reaction that started with simply making a platform unusable and force their developers to switch, and in return their users.