There were none for me.
So, given that mastodon is large, and federated, surely the problem is with me right? So, I said fuck it, let's break out the API. I wrote a scraper, seeded with a few least-bad people's profile, programmed it to pull the last ~32 toots & add all connections of the user to scrape breadth-first to get a wide array of perspectives. ~150 servers & 50,000 toots. I then took my general keyword list (~150 items, representing majority of my interests in both layman and technical terms) that I use to evaluate social networks, and search engines, and crunched through the toots.
Results: deep technical terms have accidental hits, generally used either in different context; or scratching almost none of the surface. Wide terms generally pull very low signal, from the general vicinity of conspiracy theories/how bad twitter is/crypto/mastodon is great.
I'd really really would prefer to actually use Mastodon, but
1, the features they offer optimizes against it's own usage (lack of search, lack of discoverability; you can call this positive change, but again, it optimizes against onboarding & finding interesting stuff)
2, because it's federated, there's no-one dedicated to acquiring people who have better use of their time, and
3, the people who are in there, do not, currently, would lead me to level up in directions I care about.
Mastodon represents a set of preferences, and I'm happy for you that it seems to be aligning with yours; it does not aligns with mine, is all I'm saying.
I did this and I don’t regret it.
A good solution to this problem (and "growth and engagement" at large) is to make advertising-based business models less profitable (with better and enforced privacy regulation, more liability for the ads they run, or losing Section 230 protection for those who manipulate content's reach to maximize "engagement" as opposed to being a neutral communication platform where the user controls which content is shown to them, etc) so that businesses go back to the old model of the user paying for the service, aligning the incentives of the platform with what the users want.
It would be much easier if they allowed to display mutliple accounts at same time, since they allow it separately anyway already
Personally I'm closer every day to abandoning Twitter and just focusing solely on Mastodon. Many in my social circle have already done so.
Oh, while I'm at it: if you want to view Twitter posts without having a Twitter account (or just don't want to see ads and trending crap), check out Nitter[1]. Alternative front-end. It also has minimal JS and is far more resource-efficient (viewing my profile loaded 1.56mb of resources on Nitter, compared to 9.2mb on Twitter)
[0] https://joinmastodon.org/
[1] https://nitter.net/