As far as I know, one of the headline features of microblogging networks is searching and following hashtags. On top of that, Mastodon (like Lemmy) tells users that it’s not important what server/instance you join, because of federation.
With Lemmy, I find it easy to search and interact with communities across all the federated instances. Chances are, people on my local instance (even if it’s relatively small) will have already interacted with popular communities for a given topic, so they will be easy to discover. However with Mastodon this concept seems totally broken – when I search a hashtag I want to see everything, and related posts might be spread out over hundreds of small servers for which, apparently, my small server has no content populated. With Lemmy, I understand that content gets populated on my local instance when somebody else on my instance has interacted with it before. I just don’t understand how this approach is feasible with for a system like Mastodon. Maybe I’m misunderstanding something, but it seems like the only way to have a reasonable chance of getting decent results for hashtag searches is to be on the biggest server?
This reflects my experience too. After a while, I managed to find interesting people to follow who sometimes “retweet” (forgot the Mastodon name for that) other interesting people which I can in turn follow. I now have a slow feed of varying quality and I barely visit it since joining Lemmy. Mastodon looks great if you join the same server with a large group of friends, follow eachother and use it like a group chat, but, like you, I have found it really difficult to set up an interesting feed for myself.