I think by now it's safe to say that Mastodon isn't working out for me. The mere existence of the local and federated timelines stresses me out because my posts always seem to attract Reply Guys™ exactly at the worst times but never when I have an actual question. I've also had random strangers boost my mundane life updates for no discernible reason (creepy) while my jokes and info posts largely went ignored.
Making all my posts private would not fix the problem. I do want attention *sometimes* and I've had much better luck interacting with people on Pillowfort, which is unfortunately not part of the Fediverse but more of a Tumblr alternative. I'm a big fan of the Fediverse in theory. Lately I've been exploring Bookwyrm because I finally got back into reading, and perhaps I'll eventually find more fedi projects that I enjoy.
The other big problem I've always had on here was that I just couldn't get my home timeline into a state where the ratio of posts that actually interested me to posts that didn't felt balanced. Pillowfort has communities, which work much better than hashtags for following entire topics instead of individuals, and it's easier to filter out stuff you don't want to see.
I guess I'll be on the lookout for fedi projects with similar features. Friendica sounded promising, but in the end it was too much like Facebook for me to stomach. If I do find something, I'll post about it here before eventually deleting.