You can go to your server’s Hot or Trending section and just start following big accounts, and from there find people in replies to various interesting posts to follow. Maybe.

You can also follow hashtags on there!

How big is your instance ?

On a medium sized instance, The local feed might be a good start-up to find “popular users and hashtags” (Actually, I don’t do it on Lemmy, but may-be I should)

What stuff do you find interesting ? You can follow writer like Greg Egan or Neil Gaiman, you can fallow European agencies like the one in charge of data protection, and then tons of bloggers, streamers, and other users.

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@grumpygamer

One of the creators of Monkey Island, and other historical greats.

He’s working on a personal project at the moment, that looks like it’s going to be a proper good game.

You should add your likes, what kind of topics or stuff you are interested to. So we can recommend you people to follow. If you say it this way, Mastodon is pretty big to know exactly where you fit.

I follow hashtags that I like and if I like a person’s posts I’d check their profile out and follow them. I also look at who interacts with my posts, and give them a follow as well, if I want their interests to show up on my feed. I also follow a couple of a.gup.pe groups. Bookstodon is a fun one, I got some cool suggestions there. They were also integrated with lemmy but I haven’t seen them work well here for now.