I've been on Mastodon for several years, most of it on a singular instance (well before the Twitter migration). You definitely have to go looking for your own list of interesting people to follow, and the hashtags are quieter than I'd like, but I enjoy it as a chill place to just hang out and read fun stuff and occasionally have low stakes conversations.
I've tried a few other fediverse services but none have really stuck with me except for probably now Lemmy and Kbin.
What I did in 2018 was
I feel like casting a wide net and filtering down to match your own taste and the kind of people you want to meet is a good way to start curating the Mastodon you personally want to see, since an algorithm isn't going to do it for you. It takes time but is rewarding in the end. With Masto in specific, most instances by now have upgraded software to the point where migration tools are available, so if you end up not even liking your local timeline you can take all your followers, follows, blocks etc and just try someplace else.
You could probably also use lists to help with this process somehow but I never really understood them either here or on Twitter lol.