Have you ever been on a social network under construction? The first people joining are the geeks who talk about geek stuff and the geek stuff now is the fediverse and microservers. It has always been like this.
The fediverse has been like this for years. For... What, a decade? It did not take that long for Reddit users to start talking about their hobbies. I remember a lively community for my undergrad school where people discussed events, classes, student government, the schools' governance structure, all sorts of shit, that was in... 2012? Very active for a very small niche. Much more active then than /m/nyc is now. Much, much, much more active.
I'm not in a hurry. My mastodon account is six years old, and there's still nobody there talking about anything, I have found about 12 accounts I wanted to follow — half of them are software projects or software freedom organizations, and half of them are inactive. I go there, put up a post, none of my ~300 followers see it, because none of them check Mastodon, because it's a complete ghost town.
I've been extremely patient. It's about damn time the fediverse started to happen.