Switching to mastodon has been such a breath of fresh air. No algo-driven feed manipulating me to constantly check in means that I have a much healthier relationship with it. If I'm, say, on the metro I can use it to kill time for 5 minutes... and then put it down, and I don't feel compelled to pick it up.
Be careful what air you breath in: "Twitter rival Mastodon rife with child-abuse material" [1] [2]. A lot of this was previously limited by X until a mass exodus to platforms such as Mastodon and BlueSky.
Every time I see a post from Mastodon it's always some hate and rage driven rant. Like "I can finally say what I want so f* this and that". Anecdotal of course but it doesn't really come off as less toxic.
What you can do, is curate who you follow / block so that you mostly don't see that. TBF you could do the same thing on X/Twitter to an extent but the platform has an incentive to circumvent your preferences.
If the platform wasn't the problem, nobody would've moved.
Closing down the API, charging for the checkmark, not displaying tweets to those not logged in, artificially boosting tweets by the owner itself etc etc.