So given these five very different meanings of "finding people on the Fediverse", it's not entirely clear which of them your respondents are complaining of difficulty with. Maybe all of them - I honestly think that Mastodon and clones are bad at all five.
It seems obvious to me that these five different senses of "How do you find people here?" refer to very different problems,
requiring very different solutions. An algorithm isn't going to find your friends for you; a Twitter to Federverse user mapping service isn't going to help you to find cool new content; search is probably not actually going to help you surface people you would like to become friends with.
It would be interesting to surface which of these things people are bouncing off of hardest, not least because it reveals what desires people are bringing to the Fediverse, and finding that the Fediverse doesn't support (or doesn't seem to, or does so erratically.)
5/5
@kissane
Oh one more just occurred to me! I don't know if this is what anybody means by "find people" when they're complaining of difficulty doing so on the Fediverse verse, but it seems plausible if unobvious, so:
6) "How do I find people who are talking about a specific topic at a given moment?" Here I'm not talking about finding a standing scene, but rather things like trending hashtags or topics that surface on search. If I hear a loud noise in my city, theoretically I could check Twitter, using it search function, to see if there are people talking about that loud noise they just heard in #$mytown. If I want to know what opinions are about a referendum we're going to vote on, I could search Twitter for the referendum number and state.
The purpose isn't to find people to follow or scene to join. It's totally ad hoc, and the purpose is to find information. But the way you found that information on Twitter was by finding the people who were discussing the information you wanted.
@kissane
Oh one more just occurred to me! I don't know if this is what anybody means by "find people" when they're complaining of difficulty doing so on the Fediverse verse, but it seems plausible if unobvious, so:
6) "How do I find people who are talking about a specific topic at a given moment?" Here I'm not talking about finding a standing scene, but rather things like trending hashtags or topics that surface on search. If I hear a loud noise in my city, theoretically I could check Twitter, using...