microblogging is something used on a much more personal level while i think forum style social media is mostly for looking for answers and posting things you do, but microblogging social media sites are for that too. also, this is not meant to be offensive, but i think that since mastodon has been in the works for like a long time, it looks more polished than modern websites, so that can be an advantage it has
I like mastodon a lot. I have basically found my hashtags, people and news sources to follow and so my feed is always filled with content to read. Engagement is fairly good on my instance, at least with popular topics.
But I only have 20 followers in 18 months of being on it so if that kind of thing is important to you then it can be something of a negative. Harder to build an audience without an algorithmic recommendation feature feeding your posts to strangers. I find that to be a positive though.