It's kinda weird that it used to be a platform for people that you know in real life, that's no longer the case and nothing has taken It's place.
I'm building a fediverse project that aims to fill this exact niche. It's basically a recreation of an early-ish version of VKontakte (Russian Facebook) but federated and in green instead of blue. It's not really ready yet, and there are lots of important features missing, but I do use it daily for my primary fediverse account.
I, too, am sick of all the existing social media companies trying their damnest to cater to the entertainment use case no one ever asked for.