[seszett]

> There's no way to follow someone to get updates about their work without being subjected to whatever political digressions they chose to share.

Well that's a weakness inherent to microblogging, some people like it evidently (as seen by the success of Twitter). I don't and only got a Mastodon account because I need it to follow some work I'm interested in, and indeed I need to ignore posts I don't care about.

Following and ignoring tags helps, but it's not perfect. But it works better than on Twitter.