If you have just installed Mastodon and don't know where to start to find people to follow a good idea is to try and check other users follows and one by one try to see if you find someone to follow.
Alternatively you can go to https://communitywiki.org/trunk and do the same on the categories that interest you.
If you are lazy and don't want to look up one by one, I created a little script to generate a csv from Trunk categories: https://hugo.gameiro.pt/trunk-to-csv/ that you can then import in Mastodon.
@hugo
Adding hashtags to one's profile, making an #introduction post and searching / pinning hashtags are low-effort methods, using the Fediverse's own tools, which can also help the newcomer.
@wordsmith You are correct and that will work pretty well if you are joining an instance where federated content is already present.
The reason I have made that tool is that I have seen time and again people installing Mastodon without any previous experience of the Fediverse and no list of follows to bring with them to the new installation.
@wordsmith Then they look at an empty instance where nothing happens and don't know where to start. Search will return no results and they are just left with an empty instance where nothing happens.
They invite a couple of friends, they speak between themselves a couple of times and never come back. After a while they end up deleting the installation and giving up on Mastodon without ever seeing how the network works.
@wordsmith Just decided to give this a shot because suggesting manually searching outside their installation for accounts to follow has rarely been something new users are willing to do.
