I am very active about what I consume on twitter. I follow exactly 6 people and sort the timeline as chronological.

I think the disconnect is that I'm just not interested in making a statement about my identity. My social media accounts aren't me, they are mine. I additionally don't want a feed full of people who just echo the same things I think.

That's fair - maybe it's a feature not a bug. I think that having a somewhat high-effort sign up process will prevent mass adoption of Mastodon, but maybe that's not the goal.