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.
Mastodon will never “show me only what I want” without the content being there. I mostly used Twitter to keep up with pro wrestling. All of the wrestlers, journalists, and most of the fans are still all there. I just have to wait until Twitter gets bad enough that even they all end up moving off.