One way is to just follow hashtags and see whoposts to them. Since hashtags are basically the de facto way to find relevant content on Mastodon, not just a marketing tool like on Twitter. And then once you see who posts interesting stuff, you can then add them to your follows.

There’s also some sites that list users by topics of interesting such as http://fedi.directory and https://communitywiki.org/trunk .

Another way is to check out instances that talk about things you’re interested in. There are several websites that list them but here is a shorter list: https://fedi.garden Check out their feeds and see who posts things you’re interested in.

Furthermore, you can follow a.gup.pe accounts, called “groups”, which work similarly to hashtags. Each a.gup.pe account is basically a repeater that boosts (i.e. “retweets”) every post that pings it, so that anyone following it gets that post. For example, I follow @climate@a.gup.pe, and every time someone pings that (it’s like including a hashtag), it’ll boost that post and I’ll see it too.

I’ve heard that the official app was initially thrown together at some point around the time Mastodon first blew up due to Twitter…uh, blowing up, in a different sense. Basically, “it would really help onboarding if people had an obvious choice of official app to use”. At least, that’s what I’ve heard. Never verified this myself.

Tusky is definitely decent though.