Last time I tried mastodon it was really difficult to find any quality content. Search was mostly unusable and local timeline was full of jokes and things that did not matter to me at all.
Fair enough. The current influx has made this worse (lots of metaposting about joining mastodon), but that depends on who/what you're looking for. Try another instance, maybe? That might be the greatest onboarding weakness, that if you settle on an instance that you don't like it kind of ruins the experience