I see a lot of arguments that Mastodon is better because it lacks various bad things about Twitter (algorithmic sorting, the misalignment of incentives between Twitter-as-a-company and users, centralized moderation/ownership) and it certainly is in some sense, but we're still living in a world where the social norms that were created on Twitter completely dominate any other conception of how to behave. There can be no online space that is "like Twitter but good" because anything that is sufficiently like Twitter to appeal to Twitter refugees will import enough of the culture to end up with Twitter's problems. Mastodon might be a step towards fixing the problem, but undoing the damage caused by Twitter will require the grueling and unpleasant work of changing ourselves as well as changing our technology.
The only option for us as individuals in the short term is to reject the entire model and choose to engage with other people in ways that respect each other’s fundamental humanity. Prefer in-person to online. Prefer one-on-one communication to broadcasting. Prefer small groups to large groups. Prefer local to global. Prefer synchronous communication to async. Prefer video or voice to text. Trust me, I know each of those preferences is difficult in its own way and there’s excellent reasons to choose the other option in many circumstances (like this post, in which I'm violating almost all of them!), but they’re also powerful tools for connecting with others as whole people rather than as simplified abstractions. We should work to make it easier to connect people (particularly across geographical and linguistic boundaries) but it cannot be at the cost of flattening each of us into the most shallow, reductive versions of ourselves so that we fit through the machinery we’ve built and can be easily consumed by strangers on the other end.