Ask Lemmy

Depends what you're interested in...

Lacking that information, how I went about it:

• advertise that you have Mastodon so people can follow you
• I knew two persons so I followed them and see who they boost and @mention
• I browsed the local and the federated timelines
• for every particularly interesting post or mention (raise the bar as you follow more people), check out the profile that posted it and whether you're interested in following them
• click on hashtags that sound interesting and repeat the previous step
• look for some common (nick/short)names of your city/area/country as hashtag and check if anyone uses that already. Might be worth following (you can follow hashtags, not just people). I find that it's relatively low quality, but any high quality local posts are often quite useful, so...
• don't be afraid to unfollow if a profile turns out to be less interesting than expected!

Not a one-day process of course, but pretty quickly I got my timeline fuller than the amount of time I want to spend browsing microblogs. From there I've mostly been looking at profiles that show up via boosts, very rarely looking at the general pool (the server's timeline) anymore

Once beyond that initial stage, I might recommend having a "list" (the Mastodon feature) where you add people of whom you want to see every post. For me, that's direct friends, a weekly comic I enjoy, and some people who don't post much but whose posts are nearly always worth seeing. Iirc the default behavior is that people in lists are hidden from your main timeline but you can disabled that

Tusky is the client I use. The first tab is general timeline, second tab is my "see all posts" list, third is inbox, then a hashtag I follow, then bookmarks, and that's it. Works really well for me. Hope you find (some of) this setup useful as well!