Speaking as someone who just came to the platform, I could not tell initially if there were a lot of people here or just very few. I did not want to follow all the people that were suggested to me in part because they all seemed overly bitcoin related. (I quite like Lightning btw, so one can slowly be converted :-)
But then not having followed a lot of people, my client was filtering the topics such as #scala. It took me some time to work out that I had to open the the filter on one client from close social network to the extended one (can’t remember quite which web client that was now) to see anything at all.
Then with the extended network set it still does not seem to be a lot of discussion on feeds like #scala or #RDF, well even less than on Mastodon which was not very busy either. So it helped when I worked out to add mostr.pub . Though I think tweets from there should be highlighted differently.
On an open social network one has to be able to see what the intermediary friends of friends are that led one to see a specific post, if only so that one remove some intermediaries that lead to too much spam, but also to understand how people are related.
I think whatever could help foster discussions would help people build communities more quickly.