In many ways, Mastodon feels like rewinding the clock on social media back to the early days of Twitter and Facebook. On the consume side, that means that your home feed has no algorithm (this can be disorienting at first).
Practically, it means that you see only what you want to see and only see it linearly. You never wonder “why am I seeing this and how do I make it go away?”. Content can only enter your home feed via your followed tags or handles and the feed is linear like the early days of social media.
I have the same problem as you with mastodon, I’m interested in topics not in people so the format just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
I’ve had very limited success with following hashtags, it sounds like a neat idea, but I’ve not found enough hashtags that I’m interested in with enough activity to make it worthwhile.
The nature of it also makes it more superficial - it’s short comments and posts on a topic rather than more in depth discussion.
In the end, I think mastodon is a really neat replacement for twitter - but I never had a twitter account for a reason, and those reasons are still there with mastodon, for me at least.