I think what's missing is that Mastodon doesn't cultivate the "Local timeline" in a way to encourage people to act like a community. On their iOS application I believe they actively removed the possibility of accessing it - which was hated on at the time, but the devs were very adamant to keep it like that.

There is a mastodon fork called Hometown, that gives the local timeline a higher importance, but I haven't used, I don't know the details.