Hey all! I'm interested in creating an account on mastodon, and am looking to build up a list of people to follow. Let me know who your must follows are!
I have no explicit suggestions but I will just repeat what was told to me: hashtags are your friend. Find people associated with those that interest you.
Actually I take that back, the one suggestion I do have is Low Quality Facts. Their posts make me snicker usually.
Definitely Taylor Lorenz. She’s almost always on trending, but she’s a journalist always posting about twitter and musk’s controversies, very interesting content.
We Distribute is kind of like a publication about the fediverse. Great content.
Beyond that let finding people happen organically. Focus on finding hastags and groups to follow, then the interesting people will start to bubble up in your feed naturally. See also.
And if you're on a niche/topical server don't forget to get an eye on your local feed. It gets swamped on big instances but can be a great discovery tool on smaller ones.
Tech centric, run by a co-op that's also trying to be a general tech co-op of some sort currently starting some sort of software project. Run very professionally by mastodon standards. They use GitHub issues for lodging problems, issue monthly reports about things, have documentation etc, and, culturally speaking, try pretty well to be the inclusive kind of tech-centric (IE, queer, trans and BIPOC people are at the top level of the co-op). I've been on there for a while and never had a performance issue of any sort.
I heartily recommend Fox News*, but otherwise I'd suggest looking up hashtags of things you're into and following people who like what you like. And follow other people on your own server too.
It's kinda tricky, because most of the people I follow might not be interesting to others, but they're mostly good for chatting with.
I don't complicate my life with lists
1 Someone follow me
2 Lookin in the profile which themes he has
3 If it interests me, I follow back, if not, well, not.