Sure, Mastodon isn't a monolithic thing. But the massive influx of Mastodon users to the fediverse changed the culture to the point where I didn't see any reason to stick around.

I like the "make the internet weird again" stuff, revivals of Geocities and tilde clubs and so on. My impression of the Mastodon-era fediverse is that the culture is about as far as you can get from that - it was designed by people who thought Twitter wasn't sanitized enough.