Hey admins of smaller servers, i have to tell you something!
In the first days of social.tchncs.de i explored some gnusocial and mastodon servers for interesting and active users and followed them from here. So the these where about 20people from random but maybe 8 different instances and about 100 from boosts. Everything else happened by itself. I stopped with this weeks before the twitter update and never needed a bot. My server knows 601 servers atm and my federated timeline is hyperactive.