I agree - the Mastodon platform, while much better than Twitter, still makes it difficult to find good communities, and a lot of the ragebait gets pushed to the top due to engagement. It takes some active curation of your feed to make it worthwhile.
I recommend using Kbin. It reads both Lemmy and Mastodon, and can classify Mastodon toots based on tagged topic. Additionally, if you're in a community / magazine, Kbin also looks for Mastodon Toots based on moderator assigned tags to that community, and posts it in their Microblog section.