Tried Mastodon several times, but I came from Facebook and LJ, not from Twitter. UI is artificially limited both in characters and in physical size, timelines i

Tried Mastodon several times, but I came from Facebook and LJ, not from Twitter. UI is artificially limited both in characters and in physical size, timelines is a chaos of disconnected posts which behave essentially like stories - if you've missed it then it's gone. No search, no prioritization, no groups. And picking an instance is as hard today as it was years ago. What if I'm not interested in the specifically FOSS Linux area of computer technology or in the LGBT?