Mastodon isn’t really about the “celebrity” follow how twitter was, it’s more about finding your own tribe of weirdos. I second (third?) the idea of following hashtags, and then checking out those accounts that post to those tags.
The other thing I’d like to mention is the people I see happiest on Mastodon have all migrated servers at least once. Get an account on one of the big main servers, explore, then move to a small instance that suits your interests and has people you like. That makes for a much more useful and entertaining local feed. Don’t feel it needs to be a 100% match, it’s more about the people (it’s about the cones ).
I don’t really grok products like this.
If you have a fundamental disagreement with a platform, continuing to engage with it, even through a condom, is still perpetuating it. It’s maintaining that platform as still important and integral, and a place that others should continue to engage with. It’s telling advertisers that it’s still a place that’s worth their money to maintain a presence on. It stymies the momentum in shifting to an alternative; why put the effort into a new service if people are still seeing your posts?
It’s like pirating Windows instead of moving to a different OS. You’re still perpetuating the MS hegemony and telling software developers that Windows is the platform they need to develop for.