When you use the web to work with each other, you are using the web correctly. Almost no one does that. Instead people use the web to draw attention to themselves. The replies I get are mostly people trying to tag their names along with something someone else wrote to get more flow for them, more followers. It's a strategy. It's basically spam. It's not very social imho.

So the replies may look like they're addressed to you. Literally they are addressed to you. But they're not for you, they're for bots basically, or people behaving as bots. Mastodon is mostly like Twitter in this way. I have had some interactions that were legitimately about working together, but they're few and far between.