@AdiFoord what I've found with Mastodon (and the wider fediverse) is that you just have to start following folks who seem kinda interested in what you're doing or who are doing interesting things. they boost "toots" from folks they follow, so you find their accounts too.

because of how ActivityPub (the protocol Mastodon uses to federate = share posts across instances) works, you don't really have a global view to the fediverse (network of all federationed servers). I think that makes hashtags less effective of a discovery tool, but it works as a filter for the posts you would already be receiving