I use Mastodon for social networking. Not for consuming news or media. Things where it being a two way street is nice.

I actually just have manual bookmarks to Twitter pages of the like half dozen people I think are at all worth reading. And then I use libredirect (https://libredirect.github.io/) to avoid hitting the actual Twitter website so I don't have to log in (don't have an account anyway) and don't see nonsense recommended posts.

I assume that will break with API changes, at which point I just won't read those people anymore unless they cross post on Mastodon. But it's worked well so far.

Obviously eliminates any possibility of trying to win the comments section, but I don't really see that as a true negative.