Having moved to Mastodon, I also recovered some faith in the Internet (of old). You control your timeline. You are not the consumer being fed stuff, you choose what you want to see.
As a side note, I keep hearing people recommend threads, bluesky, or other corporate media machine du jour and I cannot understand how people can't learn a lesson. If you touch a hot stove once, you normally don't touch one again. And yet here I see people around me hoping (against all reason) that this time it will be different, really, this corporation is good, this service will not get progressively ensh*ttified like every other service that came before. It baffles me.
Mastodon is different. It is not owned by a single corp (nitpickers get your engines started) and can't be turned into a machine that juices your attention span for money.