I still don't know how to use mastodon, I feel like I'm only here to share my stuff and read replies, and less so any kind of discovery of following and engaging with other people's stuff

it seems like there's only a chronological feed of those you follow (which I usually don't like because it skews to the most active people), and a generic feed for your instance (pretty much useless), but no algorithmic discovery thing?

@acegikmo That's the design. Philosophically, the Mastodon developers don't want to support any kind of algorithmic discovery. I think it's obvious that this approach means it can never support the kind of positive discovery and vitality you see on Twitter. I wrote a ranked timeline early on to try and find stuff better, it does work, but it hammers the instance I'm on and I didn't have the motivation to fix that. I went back to Twitter for my free gamedev mentoring as I have no reach here.
@acegikmo That means that practically, I end up helping 10x less people, which pragmatically seems a lot worse to me.
@acegikmo So as far as I know, there is no way to use it to get what you want.