I started to really build my following on Mastodon when Twitter fired their accessibility team, which was the same time as all the other Twitter disasters that drove people away. However, I had it really easy: I’m blind, in the blind community, and follow lots of others in that community, so I just needed to look through people’s followers and shout about my username and instance, and everything came together. I have people who have expressed interest in joining but who are not blind or part of any other specific community like that; they just want to check it out. I’m not really sure what that’s like, and not sure what to recommend to them either. Are there some hashtag lists anywhere so people can find posts/users that align with whatever they might be interested in? How do “normal people” find their people?
Moreover, in English “to look” has a meaning that may be somehow similar to “search” or “go through”, while in Italian this is not true, you would use a different verb, so it could be evn more on my side than yours.
Coming to your question, I want to add that the advantage is that, by being patient, my timeline in mastodon is now well crafted, informative, enjoyable and effective, in contrast to what I got on traditional socials where I tend to scroll indefinitely with my brain turned off. What I mean is that it pays off