Sure. Right now, everyone has to make a trade-off between accepting a smaller network and engaging with corporate garbage designed to create rage and clicks. Personally I'm happy to sit on the smaller network and contribute a bit and wait for it to build naturally. That's why I'm here on Lemmy too.
I only use it sporadically, but when I do, I often write replies and get replies. I think you need to mutually follow a lot of people before it starts working (like, a thousand or more). I'm not convinced the reply rate is significantly lower than BS or twitter..
Re: your last comment: for sure. To me that's another bonus of fediverse, e.g. since mastodon is at least partially able to interact with Lemmy and other fediverse apps, and that will presumably improve over time, eventually you will be able to do at lot of cross-app interaction from one place.
If you want microblogging social media just use mastodon (or one of it's forks). Even if Bluesky is decent now, it's owned by venture capital, so it's only a matter of time before it enshittifies.
I've been half wondering if they are already vibe coding everything, given the number of bugs that I've noticed in outlook online over the last few months
I bought a second hand Intel NUC and put a big harddrive in it (I think only.some models have a slot). Works pretty good.