@dwb It'll take some time. It's not the same as Twitter, but there is a community and interesting things here. There's also still a lot of churn. Waves of people come over, but not everyone stays. But each time the wave gets bigger and those that remain gets a little higher. I'm still finding it, in a good way, to be a lot like Twitter in 2009/

@dwb A few tips:
• Hashtags matter again. You can follow hashtags, which helps to find folks you might want to follow, and the best way if you want to keep up with a live event, like some news story or something like the Super Bowl
• Local feed == your neighborhood firehose. Federated feed == your entire city's firehose. Fun to dip into to see what's out there
• All the API tools to find people from Twitter here have been broken by Twitter, but this tool is handy here https://followgraph.vercel.app

@dwb if you are on a Mac, @ivory is really the best. From the makers of Tweetbot. Currently iOS and the Mac version is in beta (it’s great). https://tapbots.com

If you aren't finding enough posts with random news stories you weren't expecting, I’ve found Artifact, which is like a denser Apple News, helps fill that void https://artifact.news

Lastly, this is insanely long but a decent FAQ
https://github.com/joyeusenoelle/GuideToMastodon