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?
Hashtags can help, but honestly I think the only way to start is to interact with people. Having your bio filled out and starting to chat with people in local goes a long way, and other users will help steer you to new content at least as well as hashtags.
Think of it as hanging out at a new pub.