I never use Twitter to keep up with anybody who I know in real life, Its always where I go to get the latest news, the latest updates about anything I am interested in and musk doesn't seem to really care about that.

Mastodon is way too niche to have the variety and the relevancy of X and Facebook is just way too cowardly to build a platform that's actually relevant to real life and not just wasting time while selling as many ads as possible.

I think the best way to be up-to-date with people is ironically to use messenger app stories, they are almost always encrypted and will show up to all of your contacts without any algorithms in between.