Once I followed people and accounts I wanted to see, their feeds automatically took over. What you saw was Meta filling the feed with something so average users don’t see an empty void and give up.

A friend who signed up at the same time was seeing my activity too. If I responded to someone, he could see it and join in the conversation, and vice versa. I actually didn’t how Threads took this route. I personally found it more appealing than Twitter and Mastodon when I first signed up and had nothing but an empty feed and had to go find everyone.