My experience as well. I blitzed and grinded followers cuz it was easy and why not. My feed is okay in general, but I had to follower 1.5kish people to get it that way.
But I still get more than twice the engagement and meaningful engagement at that on Mastadon and Kbin, with less than half the followers. I also get little out of twitter, but I may be bad at it.
They have also already declared that if you federate with them, your instance has to abide by their code of conduct, so they already throwing their weight around.
That town was a character, and the most compelling one in the series.