Okay, so I never used Twitter but figured I'd give Mastodon a try.
But what do you even do there? Is it just a place where you wait for specific people to shout into the void? And then what?
Also how do I even find interesting subjects or people to follow?
Twitter/microblogging is a weird thing in general but you seem to have the idea. It can be useful for following events or people who write interesting things.
Mastodon hashtags are the way to discover conversations and people to follow, they go across instances in search.
Sometimes it's useful following specific projects or organizations you're interested in to be notified when anything interesting is going on. In a way similar to an RSS feed I suppose
@Cuteblooded@Troll I just follow a bunch of people and hashtags. Anybody suggests following something or someone I do. It's easy to unfollow if you end up not liking the content from someone or some hashtag.
@Cuteblooded@Troll I found that posting about stuff that interests me, following bright people who respond, and using hashtags is not a bad way to start. And check the local feed and the fedi feed from time to time to find new people to interact with. #welcome
@Cuteblooded@Troll shout into the void... Or voice an opinion... If enough of us voice an opinion it might change things... the alternative is keeping silent and that is not mentally healthy
You can also shout into the void yourself. Eventually somebody might notice and reply.
You can watch the local or federated timelines and if someone says something interesting you can follow them and reply. Or you if you get linked from elsewhere to a good post you can follow the author. Or you can see a list of popular hashtags (or look up a hashtag) and see posts in them, or post to them.
@Cuteblooded For starters, hashtags seem to be a bigger deal here than on Twitter. You can follow hashtags for their themed content, or just search them to find people to follow. And if you hashtag your posts by category, people will actually notice.
@Cuteblooded Assuming the instance you joined is some kind of community that you’re a part of, check out the Local feed. Other people on your server may show you some good stuff and/or be worth following.
Problem for me is that Twitter for me is about the official announcement-y things which aren't leaving lol. It's not great, but for football news all the journalists are still there, and so are the clubs.