I'm finding so many interesting people here on mastodon "this time round". Yet when I look at the dates they joined, they were already here when I joined back in 2022, when #X began its fall. Yet shortly after, I had many months of dismay at not finding what I wanted here, and so eventually a period of not checking in. Maybe we were still novices at using the tools availablee? - already lulled into the stupor of curation-by-default that the old platform provided, at first unbiased, then tainted with all the imposed unpleasantness that has become epic.

Technique [1] I've found useful is to search words and # 's then ADDITIONALLY follow people who post interestingly on those topics. There're defects in the "#"-federation system that mean ⚠️⚠️you'll only see # mentions in your home timeline from instances that you or those you follow actually /already/ follow actual accounts on. @FediTips explains this in their guides and posts.

Combined technique [2] is to use #lists and the 🔔 #alert at the top of profiles: those that post occasional gems and not much else... because otherwise the gems get lost in the deluge of boosts from prolific re-posters. #Lists in conjunction with the "tweetdeck" multi-column window. All this means that in a quick scan of your app you see more of the gems of the posts since you were last here, rather than the random deluge of the moment you check-in.

And my shout- out-of-the-day found by this method @sellathechemist