Microblogging is honestly just a bad concept. Mastodon has like 20x the amount of MAUs as lemmy, but it feels empty because all those users are so spread out.
Here its easy for people to group around a topic, but on microblogging platforms that dont use algorithmic recommendations, you will not find new "content" unless you actively look at 3rd party lists or the discover feed.
Bluesky has done something important, which is subscription lists that you can import into your account to automatically follow a bunch of people that fit the criteria of that list. Mastodon will need to add things like this or people will always just look at the platform and think "There is nothing here".
I personally like having a minimalistic feed that only shows me things that i actually care about, but others just want a stream of stuff to keep them entertained. The latter might not be a good goal to strive for, but i think it could be achieved with mastodon while preserving user choice.