My Fediverse Advice:

* Follow more people. No, even more people than that. Basically, if you find a real person and their posts are good follow 'em
* If you get a good reply to a post boost it. If you make a good reply to a post boost it. Replies are not visible in the feed unless you do this. As long as the post is an OK start to a conversation or interesting boost it.
* Write thoughtful replies. And if you put effort into a reply boost it or probably only the people tagged will see it.

@futurebird A thing for folks on small instance / hosting their own / on a friends instance: try and use the "view on origin" (or similarly named feature on your software) to see all replies to something through the posters instance. This will stop you repeating something that someone already replied with by accident because it hasn't federated over to you. Only really an issue on smaller instances with poorer federation