if you see a good post, follow whoever made it. then go to their page and see if they've reposted some other good posts. follow those people. repeat until you've got a healthy timeline. you can always unfollow later of course! but without a recommendation algorithm or anything like that, you have to curate your own timeline. check out tags as well! and most importantly, have fun and be yourself
This is so true but also like, this is super important:
you can always unfollow later of course
There's a site culture around unfollowing and following and re-following here that's different from the rest of the interwebs. Elsewhere it's taken as an insult or hurtful thing but the overall culture around it here is incredibly chill. I think most people understand that because we have to curate our own timelines by who we follow and there's no visible numbers attached to followings so it's less noticeable overall. So like...I strongly recommend "Follow everyone who makes a single good post you like" that Nicky mentioned, and then unfollow if it turns out their content isn't to your tastes.
Also my second piece of advice - top right corner of each posts, three buttons. One of those options on every post is "silence this post." It will hide it from your timeline. If a post is getting shared too much and you're tired of seeing it, or if it's bothering you for some reason, or if it's just about something you don't like, it's a great option.
EDIT: Comment that has useful advice I'm pulling up into the main post, from @Jama
Secondary silence post tip for new people: Click on the time stamp of the original post, then silencing that one. It'll silence all shares and reply shares of that post. If you do it just to a shared copy it'll only silence that shares and any shares of that one specifically
If there's certain topics that you want to avoid entirely, check how to muffle and silence tags in settings, and then muffle (if you want to be able to see but it's a topic that people often fail to TW or just if it's something you only want to engage with when you have spoons) or silence (if you don't want to be reminded that topic exists) all tags associated with the topic you can find. I have that for some tags around topics that I think are important, but need to be able to take a deep breath and opt in before reading them, and it's made my site experience 9000x better. Every site should have that feature.
