I’ve seen posts from folks asking about engagement and how Mastodon works —
You’ll get mansplained by the whole damn place I’m sure, but I have a simple strategy. I follow people, and anyone that I notice following me gets a follow back unless it’s clearly a scam account.

There’s no algorithm here, so the main thing early on is just following lots of folks so you start to get their content and reboosted content and so forth.