It's still an empty place. I just moved over, and I could find NO ONE with my interests (a common hobby). There are / were thousands of people in this group on twitter. I doubt it's even one percent of even what's left on X.
Bluesky waited too long to open up. They'd have seen a lot more takeup if they'd been available when Twitter started going downhill post-Musk. But they made a lot of their potential userbase write them off, which is going to stunt any possibility of growth.
Neither they nor Masto were ready for the scale at the time. Mastodon had a lot of difficulty -- servers were slow and broken for a while.
BlueSky was also not a practical Twitter replacement for a lot of people until a few weeks (!) ago when they finally added video support.
Also, have you not seen the latest user growth stats on BlueSky? Apparently it took the total destruction of the United States postwar consensus to achieve people finally abandoning Twitter en masse, but hey, it's happening in the past week or so.
> I would have hoped people would have taken BlueSky at their word when they were told they weren't wanted.
That's an unusual way of viewing it.
When you're waitlisted for an app that has limited capacity, you take it as not being "wanted"?
Of course they want you! They're just building capacity so that you can have a good experience once they're ready to send you the invite. Don't worry -- you are wanted!