@Tekk
You search hashtags that are relevant to your interests, browse your local timeline or the timelines or other servers supporting topics or communities you're interested in, reply to people's posts and read replies to posts that interest you to engage with them.
It's like being at a festival or a convention and joining the conversations that interest you or having friends introduce you to people instead of having like... an app pair you up with other attendees based on info from your profiles.
It's more organic and human scale, but i know a lot of folks aren't used to using social media that way anymore, for better or for worse.
There is also the followgraph webapp which will tell you who your followers follow, which can be helpful for finding new people to follow
@robotmonkeys @kissane