I like mastodon a lot. I have basically found my hashtags, people and news sources to follow and so my feed is always filled with content to read. Engagement is fairly good on my instance, at least with popular topics.
But I only have 20 followers in 18 months of being on it so if that kind of thing is important to you then it can be something of a negative. Harder to build an audience without an algorithmic recommendation feature feeding your posts to strangers. I find that to be a positive though.
My biggest problem with microblogging sites is that I have never been able to get a good, interesting content feed out of them without also getting lots of noise. Following hashtags usually gives me a mountain of retweets (or whatever) and trying to follow groups of related people/subject matter experts gives me lots of irrelevant content. Community-style social media forces people to more strictly categorize their content, I think.
Forums are for narrower topics or subject, while the world is your oyster when it comes to microblogging. I'd feel limited on a forum site, whereas here I can follow everything from gaming to dog posts.
The fundamental flaw with microblogging is that people follow other people. Those people then spew a bunch of random posts on all sorts of topics. Very few people are consistently interesting, leading to a timeline / feed of random crap with a few nuggets of goodness scattered through it. This is unavoidable because of the person-follows-person architecture.
There are other pernicious effects that come from centering the individual. The narcissism, defensiveness, dunking are all enflamed, rewarded and promoted. Mastodon avoids some of this by not using a recommendation algorithm but the fundamental mistake of centering of the individual remains.
Also short-form content tends to be brainrot that destroys attention spans and reduces complex issues to bite-sized hand grenades to lob at The Other.
Combine hand grenades with narcissism and news/politics and the result is kinda predictable in hindsight.
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