I moved from Twitter to Mastodon when Elon bought Twitter. I think what you saw on Mastodon was a product of what you were following (people and hashtags).

The other nice thing happening somewhat recently is that I can follow Bluesky (through a bridge) and Threads (some accounts now, more as federation between the platforms matures).

Not being able to follow the brands you want is just a symptom of them not being on these platforms yet. I follow a few news outlets, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Kagi search, Vivaldi browser, Cloudflare, Mozilla, The Internet Archive, etc.

I’m hoping more show up on these platforms with time and that BS and Threads actually do integrate more fully with Mastodon.