I never understood the attraction of twitter, so mastodon doesn't appeal to me either.

I won't try to convince you, but I am exactly like you, I still use Twitter from time to time (although not as Elon wants, I use this version) anyway, still just use it from time to time, but I gave it a chance to Mastodon (Moshidon and Megalodon clients) and I really liked to follow hashtags, I think I find more interesting content that way compared to whatever Twitter algorithm wants to show me, with that said it is not perfect, but it is definitely an improvement because, not everyone is advertising themselves there, so you pretty much need to work your way to curate your stuff (which as I have said, found it better) and it is not very different than following communities here, I dislike that even when I have filtered out languages many foreign languages still leak in the posts (something that I have not suffered here).

And even when both Mastodon and Lemmy are a shadow compared to Twitter and Reddit I still find more "niche" stuff in Mastodon than Lemmy, for example I have had some talks about Hotel Dusk and The Last Window (DS games) there and I don't recall having that interaction here, but that could just be because Mastodon might be more popular and has a higher user base (just as the corporation ones are).