@FediTips I have a free and ad-free set of Mastodon tools at https://mastogizmos.com . For finding people to search I recommend Hashtag Harvest and the Big Mastodon Hashtag Search.
There's also the Mastodon Custom Verfied User Search if you're looking for people linking to specific sites.
If you want to see what's going on generally there's MastoTrends and Gift Article Gazette.
@FediTips Not directly related to this post but I wasn’t sure where else to ask - you’ve written on your website that if you aren’t sure what server to choose to just pick a general one, but if you can do that then what’s actually the use of picking a server with a niche, and what does your choice of server actually affect from a user perspective? I signed up to mas.to as a random choice but I’m worried that I’m missing out on some of the experience by not picking a server based on interests.
Smaller servers tend to have more of a sense of community:
-The Local timeline (called Community on the official app) is slow enough and friendly enough that it's fun to browse and discover people through.
-It's a lot easier to discuss things with the server admin
-The moderation quality tends to be higher as the "staff-per-user" ratio is a lot higher, which just means it's easier for the admin to keep up with moderation tasks.
On massive general servers things like the Local timeline scroll way too fast and tend to be too random to be much use for discovery.
But I wouldn't worry about missing out, general servers are the best place to be if you're unsure. Once you've been on here a while, the significance of niche servers should become clearer
Many people have a general account on a general server and also niche accounts on niche servers, for example a cookery account on a food server etc.
@FediTips Ah okay, that makes enough sense. So for now I can probably just ignore the local timelines and only look at the federated ones and just look at my interests through the hashtags
However, if your server has full text search activated you can search for multiple words or phrases at once. (But this will only produce results from people who have opted into full text search system.)