The key to making Mastodon 'work' is simple, commit to posting here, ignore Twitter as well as you're able and as you detox from that environment it becomes less and less appealing
@ancient_catbus
And, if you really want to speed up weaning yourself off Twitter, use a proxy service like Nitter to not only not give any monetizable information to them, but to see just how shitty it’s gotten. Raw dog that site without the algos hiding away stuff from you and you’ll see that it’s down to spam accounts and gamer words.