There are a number of "sub-hobbies" within amateur radio. It's a lot like asking what people with a Linux box actually do with their setups. From a completely practical point of view, the internet and cell phones can do most of what ham radio can do; people do it for fun.
Technical or social conversations are definitely a common activity. Especially during the first few months of COVID my local repeaters were very active just with people seeking a bit of human community.
Emergency preparedness is a common side hobby; many municipal/county emergency services have a corresponding ARES/RACES group with which they have points of contact, regular drills, and so on.
Other sub-hobbies are more purely technical, like DX (long distance communication; there will be contests with goals like "most different countries contacted"), or QRP (doing as much as possible with minimal radio power); satellite or moonbounce or meteor-scatter; homebrew (building some or all of your equipment); a variety of (usually low bandwidth) packet switched networks; slow-scan video; etc.
Orthogonal to all of the above is the variety of modes and bands people use: you can use VHF FM handhelds not unlike a walkie-talkie; voice or digital or Morse modes; microwave or 2-meter (city-range) or 80-meter (continent-range) or etc; traditional hardware or SDR or deliberately archaic tubes; operating from home or your car or packing your station on foot to a remote mountaintop.
I'm part of a TARPN and the main thing we do is chat. There is a simple chat program that runs on the network so we can do realtime multi-user chat. It's pretty fun.
The trick is to get a few Raspberry PIs and install the software. The NinoTNCs are really cheap so you can make a network on your desk without any radios. Then get the radios after you can con some couple of other hams within a few miles to play with it with you. It's a kick.
Any radio amateurs here? What do you actually end up doing with your setups? Do you have conversations with other amateurs or something else?
If it wasn’t completely obvious, I don’t really know much about the ”scene.”