Back to the future: Mastodon is restoring the lost art of online conversation

As someone that loved the 1995-2005 internet, and used to believe that mastodon was the future, how do I go about getting into it again?

It seems I was pessimistic that mastodon could compete with big tech, and counterintuitively, it took one of "my" guys, Elon, to blaspheme the left into counterintuitively making mastodon a viable reality again.

I think the potential is to have a twitter/reddit hybrid where tangentially connected communities are a thing again, and expertise is agreggated in the proper spaces to provide expert level insights and advice on narrow and specific topics.

But I'm not sure how to go about, say, joining a like minded community of apolitical bbq enthusiests, or stereo enthusiests, or technology enthusiests.