@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.