You don't need to use the official Mastodon apps, they're not the best way to use Mastodon. The official apps only arrived last year, and they were intended as "Fisher Price My First Mastodon" things with a restricted set of features.
Third party apps have been around longer than official ones, and include way more features. You can sign in with the same account on all apps.
On Android try Tusky, Fedilab, Megalodon, Tooot
On iPhone/iPad, try Toot!, Ice Cubes, Ivory, Mona
@feditips Do any of them have a partial-mute feature? I'll probably try them at some point and see what I do/don't like, but that's the one thing that's specifically been on my mind lately.
I mostly follow back anyone who follows me (if I wasn't following them already due to knowing them from elsewhere), but I ended up unfollowing a couple because they just toot *all the time* (in one case boosting some of their own past toots daily) and it was kinda drowning out everything else. But I wouldn't mind receiving an arbitrary subset of their toots (one per day, one per 8 hours, three per day with most <insert some metric here>, whatever).
I get the whole "stop enshittifying my feed and just give me what I asked for", but I don't always want to ask for *all* of a thing.
The nearest you can get to a partial mute is temporary mutes (you can set a time limit when you do normal mutes), and hiding someone's boosts by selecting "hide boosts" on their profile page.
Also, if there are some topics that come up too often you can filter your timeline to hide certain words or phrases behind a warning, or leave them out completely.