[Calishat]

I made a bunch of Mastodon search tools that are available free and free of ads at https://mastogizmos.com/ . (You can use the site on your phone but it works better on desktop.)

If you're looking for people to follow or interact with I recommend Hashtag Harvest, which will give you results for a hashtag search but also show you related hashtags and users associated with those hashtags. There's also Wikipedia-Mastodon Thing, which keyword-searches Wikipedia for articles which have associated Mastodon accounts or instances.

(I only started learning JavaScript a couple of years ago and I made MastoGizmos about a year ago, so you don't need to tell me it's goofy looking. I'm going to revamp.)

Also, I found that when I was wandering around the web I would see Mastodon people I wanted to follow. I made a little bookmarklet for ease of following-while-browsing. It's available here: https://github.com/ResearchBuzz/Mastodon-Follow-Bookmarklet .

Hope this helps. I'm [e-mail] ; if you have an intro post tag me and I'll give it a bounce.