I don't think Mastodon has any chance of overtaking Twitter. Here's how I would do it:
Create basically a clone of Twitter, with the same UI and functionality. The goal would be to make transition as seamless as possible. I have no interest in learning about why Mastodon works, why it runs on multiple domains and getting used to its UI. I just want Twitter without Elon.
Make it possible to easily transfer your data, including the people you follow. You would be able to see which of them are on the "new Twitter" and get notified when they switch.
Be inventive in making people convert. Perhaps organize a coordinated switch of many high-profile users to generate a lot of media attention. Or provide incentives such as some sort of ownership share.
It's not about the look of the social network - it's about the people you are interested in moving to a place and you following them. Mastodon has been that for me (the infosec people moved over and enough interesting "celebs") and I've been enjoying my time after a couple of days of adjustment.
You'll probably get that if Musk steps down as CEO... The best part about Mastodon IMO is that it's NOT Twitter, speaking as a Mastodon user of course. It feels way more manual and it feels like I need to build my feed and community myself, but it's empowering for specifically those reasons.
Not that I care, but you could even copy the current twitter usernames to your new twitter, alongside all their public tweets and followers. So, when switching, a user wouldn't even need to add back their data or find back their previous followers.
Create basically a clone of Twitter, with the same UI and functionality. The goal would be to make transition as seamless as possible. I have no interest in learning about why Mastodon works, why it runs on multiple domains and getting used to its UI. I just want Twitter without Elon.
Make it possible to easily transfer your data, including the people you follow. You would be able to see which of them are on the "new Twitter" and get notified when they switch.
Be inventive in making people convert. Perhaps organize a coordinated switch of many high-profile users to generate a lot of media attention. Or provide incentives such as some sort of ownership share.