[beej71]

The ratio of garbage to great content is greater than it has ever been in history.

But we also have more great content than we've ever had in history.

I'm a relatively old-timer (Internet from ca. 1992) and I love the stuff I get from Mastodon and Lemmy. Kagi is awesome--and has a small web search. uBO is a Godsend--there are multiple means to pay content creators directly. Hell, even comp.lang.c is still kicking and spam is down now that Google bailed on Usenet.

Will these things ever be as big as Twitter? No, at least not until Twitter dies. But that doesn't matter. There's still more stuff there than I can consume and that's on my personally-curated "non-algorithmic" feeds.

In short, just stay away from the garbage. Find the stuff you like.