Been using lemmy and really enjoying it. I have a twitter account that does me no good so Mastodon seemed very appealing. I joined an instance, made some posts, tried interacting with a lot of people. . . I dunno. It just never really grabbed me.
I’ve noticed that content seems to federate on lemmy better than on Mastodon even though lemmy is younger, and I’m under the impression this is true for kbin as well though I don’t personally use it. I’d love to hear how you guys feel about it - as an artist the idea of having a blog to share my creations as well as life updates is cool but man it’s just so dead
So, the issue with Mastodon is that there’s no global search and discovery. In order to be found, things have to be hashtagged. The problem with hashtagging is that twitter clout weirdos made hashtagging SO uncool that nobody, anywhere, wants to do it anymore. So, do search hashtags related to your interests and follow folks that are posting to them, but that may not get you too many hits.
If you’re on an instance that isn’t enormous, try the local timeline to identify some folks to follow. On big instances, that’s not usually useful because it’s too big a firehose.
For art specifically maybe see the stuff that curator on mastodon.art boosts: https://mastodon.art/@Curator
This is why Lemmy/Kbin is potentially cooler for some applications than Mastodon. Since communities are (a) not stigmitized like tags and (b) also mandatory, plus search exists, it’s much easier to find things! (Although there’s not yet much to be found)