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.

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

Check out the federated timeline.

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.

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)

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.