Mastodon: Starterpacks follow and create them
You may know Starterpacks from Bluesky they were one of those features making it quite easy to find new people on Bluesky – especially when you just started using it. Mastodon has Starterpacks too, sort of.
No, it's now Mastodon feature by know, which would be cool. But there are Starterkits provided by Fedidevs which serve the same purpose.
Under https://fedidevs.com/starter-packs/ you can see existing Starterpacks. So you may want to take some time and scroll a bit. Of course you can also search for topics you are interested in. Once you selected one of those packs, you can follow the accounts included. For that you have to authorize Fedidevs to follow accounts on your behalve.
As soon as you authorized them, you can follow accounts on those Starterpacks. And that's a main difference to Mastodon lists, where you have a certain timeline for those accounts. So you may want to fine tune your home timeline afterwards, by unfollowing certain accounts.
Of course you could also go through the list of accounts of a Starterpack and follow only the accounts you are interested in.
Even though this solution isn't as elegant as the Bluesky approach it is a good starting point for new users. And if you like, you can create your own Starterpacks to give new users some guidance.
Oh, by the way. If it is a bit too much for you to manage your Mastodon posts and your Bluesky posts and keep everything in sync. Simply use Sociabli to cross post from one to the other and keep the focus on your favorite network. Simple as that.