Microblogging doesn’t seem to me to be a good model for community engagement. Like you say, it’s a big room with people yelling, so it’s hard to understand more than a snippet of what one person is saying.
Mastodon is better than Twitter/X, but I think that is mostly because more people on Mastodon are there with the intent to find more meaningful engagement. That advantage is decreasing as more of the Lowest Common Denominator signs on.