@jerub A lot of people use their instance's local timeline in this situation, but that requires you to join a moderate-sized themed instance. On something like mastodon.social, you are trying to drink from a firehose, and on single-person instances there isn't really a local timeline.
I like the instance I'm on, but it's not FOSS/programming themed, and it has unfairly gotten on some block lists due to fedi politics a few years back, so YMMV.