I'm getting a lot of value out of Mastodon. I found a medium sized instance who's moderator I trust, and whose culture matches matches what I want out of a social media website. Not having posts algorithmically shoved into your face helps a lot, because it is clear where posts on you home timeline are coming from and thus easier to customise your experience by blocking people.

The main problem with mastodon is that it's hard to discover a good instance to create your account on because you only get a good feel for the instances after you spend some time on there. This isnt all negative because the somewhat higher barrier of entry makes for a better userbase I think, because you need to do a bit of research.

I Honestly think that having a public square where people of all ideologies discuss everything is not that great. I don't want to discuss the US election with trump supporters, or read antisemetic garbage on my feed, I just want to shoot the shit with friendly likeminded people. I've been hanging around mastodon for 2 years now and I can count the times that it has made me mad or annoyed with another user on one hand. The ratio of positive experience to negative experience is way better than twitter.

For me mastodon is a place to talk about interesting tech, look at people's art, crafting obscure jokes that are only funny for an extremely online audience, and hanging out with a diverse group of techies, gamers, leftists, artists, philosophers, scientists, LGTB+ folks, solar punks.