Mastodon

For one, I've found following Feditips to be very useful; they give a lot of good advice on how to use the Fediverse and find other people. They are a bit Mastodon-specific -- which is fine if you're actually using Mastodon, of course -- but a lot of their advice applies to other Fediverse instances like Firefish or Akkoma, too.

The general advice I'd give is:

• Use hashtags! Put hashtags in any post you want other people to be able to find, and find out what hashtags are popular for whatever kind of content you like, then search for them regularly.
• Many people start by making an account on mastodon.social first because they're the largest instance, but it's easier to find people with similar interests if you join an instance focused around that; then, you can look at the local timeline to find people talking about things you like.
• If you know a lot of people on Twitter, you can use Fedifinder to try to find any of them who have Fediverse accounts.

I would say it depends on your friends. But, studies have shown the majority of social media users are lurkers so it would probably make sense for them to be on a medium to large instance. Just recommend them an instance instead of potentially overwhelming them with a ton of information. Everyone mentions hashtags but a big one is clients, those can absolutely make the experience. So, in all recommend an instance then like 1-3 clients, follow hashtags and make an #introduction post

Laurens Hof posted a roundup of algorithmic Mastodon clients that can highlight interesting stuff from a server's federated feed:

• fediview
• FeedSeer

Using those is a good way to find interesting stuff and people to follow.

I'm blind, in the blind community, and follow lots of others in that community, so I just needed to look through people's followers

Sorry, I know this is stupid, but I found this sentence really funny 😳

Coming to your question, there are already a lot of valid suggestions, what I want to add is: it can take a bit of time, tell your friends to not immediately give up. It takes time because there is less people, so somewhat less interesting stuff. It takes time because there is no algorithm suggesting what you should follow. But if they can start with a small amount of interesting accounts, they will find that their boost will probably be from other interesting accounts that they can then follow, until the timeline becomes interesting. Just be patient :-)

Hashtags can help, but honestly I think the only way to start is to interact with people. Having your bio filled out and starting to chat with people in local goes a long way, and other users will help steer you to new content at least as well as hashtags.

Think of it as hanging out at a new pub.