There’s no algorithm, so just posting content isn’t enough. If you don’t follow people on other servers you won’t see anything in the feed, and reply threads will be empty. It took a while to find the right people to follow but now I get as much out of it as I used to get from Twitter. Hashtags are a lot more important too for discoverability since there’s no search function.

My engagement is still low, but on Twitter I would post something and it would just never get seen. Now at least a couple of people will often reply.

In November I got disgusted enough to leave twitter, not just pull the plug, tear it out of the wall. To be clear -- very small twitter account, under 1K followers.

I just set up a new Masto account on a larger server, started watching, following, engaging.

A small case in point: Rands In Repose blog's accounts on both platforms. 42K followers on Twitter and 7.7K followers on Mastodon. Despite Twitter having 5.45 times as many followers, Michael Lopp reports significantly higher engagement on Mastodon. Just had this conversation with him.