If you're thinking of trying Mastodon, I would recommend joining an interest-specific or locality-specific server rather than one of the general purpose servers, because the local community is likely to be stronger and more engaged. You can always jump ship later if you find it's not your thing
I'm not sure I would describe them as "barely-working". Have you used any of them lately? They work very well in my experience.
The improvement I think is you can jump to a different instance, and being all your followers and following with you. Whereas if you're the subject of an arbitrary decision by the Twitter overlord, all you can really do is post about it online and try to stir up enough bad PR for the company that they reverse their decision.
Some examples:
- https://fosstodon.org for FOSS - https://infosec.exchange for infosec - https://sfba.social for the bay area
There's a map of locality-specific instances here: https://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/map/mastodon-near-me_828094