Currently, Mastodon is in a very similar state. I often have deep, insightful conversations with interesting people, some of who are even local! Its like Reddit circa 2008, but easier to find quality users to add to your feed.
Is Mastodon good now? I've never been able to have a conversation on Twitter that isn't with people I already know, yet people apparently do; I don't know how they do it. Mastodon has always seemed like an even bigger mess than Twitter was with the same issues but it's "federated," as if that's supposed to solve any actual issues.
With joinmastodon.org you can try to narrow in an instance that meets your interests. I signed up for three to just explore which ones I wanted to be on. One was Mastodon.social which is fairly large, and then two more niche ones. Being able to explore the niche ones for their topics, but knowing I can hop into federated or .social is kind of like utilizing lists.
I think all of this allows you for to more easily just throw a thought out there and get some engagement since your smaller niche instances will have less noise.
Mastodon is fairly decent, I've taken to looking at my local instance's aggregate feed and the federated timeline to find interesting discussions. Browsing the federated timeline is a bit about timing, as the federated timeline can get quite busy with uninteresting posts when Japan wakes up.
