If there are people you enjoy on YouTube or other forms of social media, check their profiles or about me and see if they have mastodon links.

You can search by hashtags for posts. What I do is I am on a smaller instance so I just view the local timeline.

The big question is: What are you interested in and on what instance are you? For new users the local timeline is the best way to start building your network. Of course that only works if you picked an instance that caters to your interests.

Honestly that’s my biggest problem with the official app always pointing you mastodon.social. It hides away one of the best on-boarding features in order to be more familiar rather than trying to make it work.

Another way to find people is the fedifinder, a tool that shows you who of the people you follow on twitter also has a mastodon account (assuming you are on twitter)

Mastodon I’ve found has a bit of a discoverability problem, but there are ways.

1 ) Start off with your local timeline: these are all the people that are on your instance as well. If you’ve chosen a “specialized” instance most of these people will have something in common with you: mastodon.gamedev.place for instance is filled with indie developers, mastodon.art is full of artists, and so on. The more general instances like mastodon.social have a lot more activity, but there’s no implicit link between people on it. It’s a trade-off: the more specialized of an instance you’re on the easier it is to find people like you and build a tight community, but the smaller the instance. The more general the instance is the more activity and people are on there, but less of it is relevant to you.

2 ) Go search up some hashtags of topics you like. For instance if you like baking go see what’s on #baking. If you’re interested in pictures of moss #mosstodon is great fun. If you like pokemon #pokemon, and so on and so forth. You can naturally follow hashtags themselves, but you can also try to use that to find people you may enjoy following - after all, if someone is posting baking pictures and you like baking maybe you’ll enjoy following them!

3 ) Go snoop out other instances. Some Mastodon clients allow you to directly view the local feeds of other instances, but you can always just go straight to the page of said instance. Find a few specialized instances for topics you like, scroll through the local feed for a bit, and follow people that look interesting to you.

4 ) Google: when I joined Mastodon I just googled a few people I like or followed on other platforms and saw if they had a Mastodon. There are also plenty of “Who to follow on Mastodon” articles out there.

5 ) In the “explore” feed you’ll find posts that are trending on your instance: often at times there are some good users there to follow, albeit it can get a bit “samey” if there’s a big news story going on.

Find @fedifollows. I boosted a bunch of newbie resources last night if you want to hit me up on there (DM me).

I literally just googled “who should I follow on Mastodon”. There’s tons of articles out there with lists of people that may be interesting to you that you can read about, and then search for them on Mastodon and follow them.

Check out the federated timeline.

I just googled the people I follow on Twitter to see if they’re on Mastodon.

Simple answer, you have to build your community. Start by searching #hashtags for topics that interest you. Hashtags are king on Mastodon. They can lead you to interesting people to follow. Next, start looking at your local and federated feeds to see who is discussing what, and follow those that interest you. Also, use #hashtags in your responses to make your stuff findable.

Hope this helps.