@tardis federated social works when you spend a lot of time shaping who you follow, and even then there is no algorithmic help sorting them, so it quickly become a mess.
Small instances have a weak "local public" timeline, basically the sum of what the local users pull in. And there is no global public, and some people even attack others proxying their public timelines, which is weird.
Facebook is a news source for me, for its longform, but twitter/mastodon/bsky is useless due to the tiny size.