The only worth it really had were the niche communities. Some of which became meme centric over time and went down the shitter.
I jumped over here on lemmy and till today im still confused on the instances, federation and defederation thing. It seems a lot of the niche communities I used to partake in do have multiple equivalent instances, but none of them are active. I actually feel lost over here if I'm being perfectly honest...
Simple. What "productive" entails has been evolving alongside tech advances.
A person today is expected to handle more work within a week that people achieved in a month a couples decades ago.