I follow several news organizations, bloggers, activists there. For example you can get Linux news from https://techhub.social/@LinuxToday or posts from Richard Stallman’s blog at https://mastodon.xyz/@rms or the EFF is https://mastodon.social/@eff – of course those aren’t the only accounts I follow, just a sample of ones you might be interested in that have recently posted things.

You can also follow hashtags on Mastodon, that sometimes helps me find accounts to follow. Recently I have however been unfollowing more accounts than I’ve been newly following because my feed was getting spammed with too many things that I didn’t find very relevant.

ETA: you can also follow https://social.growyourown.services/@FediFollows if you are very desperate for random suggestions for things you could follow

You don’t see all the furry porn, extra long Kanji posts, B-Movies, witches, hackers, and cultists?

Sure. There’s a rather vibrant writers’ community, plenty of visual artists (including photography that isn’t just cats and hiking), and the endless political shit.

You don’t get as much of the random people running their mouths though.

The key to Mastodon is the # curation over time. Search your interests, use the hashtags to set up your feed, and only use the full federated feed to find terms you didn’t think to search for, or that aren’t obviously connected to your interests.

As an example, if you’re a writer, you’ll obviously follow something lunge #writing, but you might not find #pennedpossibilities, or #writerscoffeeclub by searching, despite them being active prompt based groups that end up having a lot of good interactions between writers (casual, amateurs, and pros).

Tbh, the least represented segment is the typically nerdy stuff. Much more prevalent on lemmy. There’s plenty there, it just isn’t as common as other segments.

I was lucky to get in in the early days when posting Mastodon handles on Twitter was common so was able to easily migrate. But this is a problem with ActivityPub right now I feel like. Discovery algorithms can be awful in the timeline, but so useful for finding people/communities to follow.

I post random photos at @dch82@mastodon.social, and I post comics at @catsndogs@mastodon.social, though I am in a hiatus at the moment.

Yes. I use it to post pictures of birds.

Discovery built into Mastodon and ActivityPub microblogging in general isn’t great (and some people claim that’s a good thing). One place to look for people to follow is https://fedi.directory/

I used to post political stuff, but I had like 9 followers and got very few views, so i gave up.

It’s “nerds”, as in regular virgins pretending to be smart. Everyone else is on Bluesky.

Bots are getting more and more chatty, they fill the timeline sometimes :/