People on the radio keep talking about this revolutionary information superhighway which sounds grand but no one you know has an internet connection but you read in the newspaper that in a town nearby there is one in a public library. You travel there and find a single computer. There are no instructions and none of the staff know how it works. When you ask to see "the internet" they show you an icon to click and leave you to it. You click it, strange noises happen for a bit then stop and nothing happens, the computer seems frozen. Maybe you broke it but then literally 10 minutes later it un-freezes and you see a list on the screen:
alt.binaries.mom
alt.binaries.misc
alt.binaries.warez
alt.binaries.etc
alt.binaries.warez.flightsim
and so on, hundreds of them
comp.lang.c
comp.lang.perl
comp.lang.prolog
blah blah gibberish
Ok none of that sounds like an "information superhighway" so close the window and go back home.
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.