undefined> lemmyNSFW.com
My use case for Mastodon is quite different than yours. I only look at what I have subscribed to. It was the same way I used twitter. And in this case Mastodon works fine for me and it doesn't even matter what instance I signed up on.
I have tried to go back to RSS once I gave up Twitter. But it lacks the instant notification of breaking news that I got from Twitter. Mastodon has mostly fill that role. So I might give RSS another chance for non-breaking news.
Oddly enough I have a police scanner app that has alerts and it is also a good source for breaking incidents.