Agreed. I have tried 3 different servers (two niche topic and now one of the really big ones) and followed a bunch of hashtags and people and also filtered a bunch of keywords (to try to cut back on the mountains of fucking explicit furry art and similar) and for the life of me I just cannot get Mastodon to serve me good stuff consistently. It's frankly boring as shit over there.

Yet every time I open up Bluesky, it's tons of stuff that is relevant to me. I've also noticed that the few quality artist accounts I did find on Mastodon seem to favor their Bluesky accounts in terms of how frequently they post and engage with others.

I think Mastodon is a lot more appealing if you're into Linux or dev sorta topics but for like a professional level art community, it's terrible. Same for topics like graphic design.

Also the fediblock stuff going on throughout Mastodon doesn't get enough discussion. There's a cabal of chronically online, ban happy people that collude together on their provate Discord server to defederate Mastodon instances for the stupidest shit. The people who run matsodon.art are a big part of the problem and are legitimately out of their minds. Go look at their instance block list. It's absurd. And any time you hear about instance drama on there there's a good 50% chance they're involved somehow.