I was a user for many years. I grew frustrated to the point of disillusionment with the constant fighting between admins and prominent personalities, the attacks, the fracturing of the network... I just want to be able to talk to who I want to. Ran my own instance too, simply not blocking some guy or other is enough to get you blocked by others. The network architecture is flawed from the get go unfortunately, it's prone to this type of fracturing that makes it not really conducive to anything other than in tribe virtue signaling and echo chambers. You simply cannot get on a server and talk to anyone you want, it's not possible.

I've given up on it and moved to Nostr. A lot of fediverse people have been dipping their toes in as of late, but I took the dive, I see where the wind is blowing. The relief I felt when I no longer had to manage the appearance of my social interaction, there's a chilling effect there which is strangling mastodon and the fediverse as an actual social network and it cannot be fixed.

Works better how? Mastodon is really frustrating for non-tech people to use. I personally have found it difficult to use, but to be fair, I haven't spent a lot of time with it.