The joys of lurking or being a low-volume is when you follow some people and they do something interesting that you may have done, or you might have the little interesting data point. It sometimes happens you have published a paper on the exact topic but in another field, or you're wondering whether there's a connection to something you know.

It's an amazing way to reach very interesting people doing very interesting things and to be amazed almost every day (if you like to learn, or just like human ingenuity). It needs curating, and liberal use of blocking, muting... but having (or watching) a short conversation with a security expert, programming language warrior, database benchmarker, or HPC researcher is something I feel I couldn't do elsewhere.

Blocking / muting to get rid of replies by unwanted people? I myself never use that feature as a "lurker".

I blocked Musk and Tesla, and that filters out a lot of the note toxic tweets.

You can block people replying to other people. You can have an account and be a lurker (which mostly can be reduced to 'read-only'). You're not participating in any conversation, just filtering the content that is presented to you.