What purpose does it actually serve for you? Just filling a <microblogging social media> hole in your attentional complex?

The alternative is to do literally anything else.

Health advocacy. Literally saving lives.

I also use it for updates to customers for my business.

You're literally ignoring the elephant in the room. ActivityPub based services are definitely not a ghost town. You should give mastodon a try.

I did, see my other comment here (it is a ghost town compared to twitter).

You don't need an alternative. Let's go back to the time when people were viewed by their work.

I understand that the team at BlueSky is tiny and that they were firstly prioritizing getting a stable, core featureset out, but I firmly believe that keeping posts private to non account holders followed by the iron grip on signups during Twitter's implosion era last year was an enormous strategic blunder that they'll never recover from.

Which is a shame, because I really want them to succeed. But the amount of dead accounts I see made by people with followings on twitter, who were lucky enough to get an invite is telling. A total collapse of momentum.

Maybe it's just my circles but Mastodon is/feels pretty active. I certainly would not call it a ghost town.

I just checked, and it indeed is pretty much a ghosttown compared to twitter, and also the search doesnt work well. You cant properly search for hashtags. It only shows in the hashtags tab, not posts. So if you search for a hashtag and another word, it wont show the post youre looking for. Bsky is just as bad, as you cant search for users. In twiteer the search just works.