But unfortunately I'm not aware of a better way to be in the academic/research community. Twitter and BlueSky are where the conversations are happening. These do more for paper discovery than things like Google Scholar, Semanitic Scholar, and elsewhere. Not to mention that posts tend to have additional context that is often left out of works, making it easier to bridge into topics that are not in my niche.

The other unfortunate part, is that I too have to advertise my own work and myself to the community. The work is not enough. There's an easy to observe strong correlation between the number of citations I get and the amount of publicity my works get, with the latter strongly influenced by the efforts of myself and others in the research team. Though recognizing this, it does enable me to find a lot of hidden gems. Works that are often rejected and unnoticed because they are not from big research teams.

So far the pros outweigh the cons, well... at least for BlueSky. I can't say the same about Twitter and I'd wish more people would move over. Smaller communities have a lot of advantages.