The interesting thing about Mastodon for me is that for the time that you engage with it, it responds. When you stop, it moves on to others. There's very little residual effect. So you can basically pick it up, get a conversation going, but then you can leave it alone for a while and your presence fades away.
@triptych the thing is that unlike commercial networks, it is passive. So you need to find continuously active people to fill your feed. But finding such people that are interesting to you is difficult.
As an alternative, I've been finding interesting hashtags and interesting instances, but you need to go out of your app to read the instance timelines. Would be nice if there was some app to push content. Something like feditrends.com, but that points you to people sharing the links and that allows you to filter by server
@triptych there's also https://a.gup.pe/ which would be the equivalent of groups, but there's nothing on our shared interests out there. It's easy to start a new group, but then we'd need to continuously fill it with content