[spoonjim]

The two problems with your approach are: 1) There is always some post you'd be interested in that you won't see because it's outside your social network. Different people have different preferences on how much of this they want to see. 2) When you follow someone, you're probably interested in some aspect of what they post and not others. For example, if there's a biologist who is also a big Pittsburg Steelers fan, you're probably not interested in both types of posts.

[timbit42]

With Mastodon you can follow hashtags. I primarily do this instead of following people's accounts because most people post on a variety of topics when I'm only interested in probably one of the topics they post on. This gives me a very high signal to noise ratio and I get to see any post with hashtags I am interested in instead of just the ones by people I'm following. If someone misuses a hashtag, I can simply mute their account and never see their posts again.