Also, mastodon isn't one website, so there's no reason to stay on one instance if you're finding it slow... The whole point of the fediverse is you can talk to others between servers.

My little server is hosted on parts scavenged from a roadside sign, and if my reading of the dashboard is correct, it's peering with 7,195 other servers which is pretty insane. Virtually everyone I talk to is on another server. Despite connecting to that many servers, it's really fast and during peak times there's simply no way to keep up with the timeline scrolling past.

One website that gets into the details of what's on the fediverse in terms of websites and software packages is https://the-federation.info/ which I've used in the past to find different lemmy and lotide communities to connect to on my lotide instance, but it also lists instances using mastodon or other similar software.