[JCSato]

Honestly, without a way to search content and not just people/hashtags, there isn't an organic way for me to discover people talking about what I'm interested in, so Mastodon just isn't useful out of the gate. It relies on finding a niche community you're interested in out of the gate, and if I wanted to go that route I'd just use Reddit.

[Kye]

I've never found anything like snouts.online on Reddit. Even /r/furry doesn't come close. It's the Anthrocon or MFF of subreddits. Furry may be a niche, but it's a big niche. Mastodon has several furry-focused instances with their own unique communities.

There are a lot of good subreddits, but the nature of the experience is different from a Mastodon instance. And a Pleroma instance will also be different because the choice of Pleroma over Mastodon is conscious.

Mastodon doesn't yet have communities centered around hashtags (like #amwriting or #mbmbam, for example) like on Twitter, but it's getting there.

[AsyncAwait]

The way I found people is that I knew one person who was using Mastodon and the looked at who they follow on there and who the people they follow are following and so on.

There's also the new 'Explore' feature introduced in this release. It will take maybe a week or two until enough people enable it, but it might be what you're looking for[1].

1 - https://mastodon.social/explore

P.S. This works on any instance running 2.7 where at least one user has the Directory feature enabled, just add '/explore' to the instance root URL.