If you're reading this, you may be new or interested in seeing what's up.
What the Fed?
So putting it overly simply and from the start, the whole federation thing is basically like you following/subscribing to people/channels to make your timeline or for you page, but it's a whole community activity and some of the people/channels are from a variety of places rather than a single platform.
From there, you then curate what the community's found to suit your interests as you would in other places, following/subscribing and blocking, muting, or keyword filtering, depending on where you're participating from. For what your place and community's found, you'll look through either the "All" or "Other Servers" feeds. "Other Servers" just means only from other places and their communities, meanwhile the "All" feed is a blend of both original stuff from your place and from other places.
If you want to see only what your place's posting, sharing, and discussing, you'd look to either the "Local" or "This Server" feed. If you're from a small place, chances are this may be quieter than bigger places, like a village compared to a city. This may also extend to the aforementioned "All" feeds, but that depends on your place's community and whether they're avid lurkers following and subscribing to many without saying much, or the opposite, highly chatty with each other while not looking much beyond their little place.
Gettin' Messy
But what if your community hasn't found what you'd like to follow yet?
Here's where things get messy and either fun, or frustrating, depending on your mindset and time of day. You gotta roam the web, be curious. See the weird thing after someone's name? Like "[email protected]?" That "doughnut.delish" is another place with who knows what there. Take a chance and see what else may be found on "doughnut.delish", then copy a username or profile/channel/community link you find there with a different place name like, "[email protected]" into the search for your place and try to follow it.
Okay, so that's a whole thing, and it's more involved than corporate social media where it's often just a click, but that's how the raw discovery tends to work around here because it's connecting different places. It's clunky and manual, but once you've done it, you've helped your place out by making sure others don't have to do that. It's often a thankless task, but so is much of finding things for strangers.
Also it's worth mentioning, sometimes it won't work in your place, because technology is complicated and hard and everyone's using it a little differently. It's always a little wonder any of this works even a quarter as well as it does, all things considering.
Some Discovery Resources
However, there's more to finding other stuff than that, because the point of all this is community, and that means you're not alone. There's a number of resources to help.
For link aggregators using Lemmy or similar, there's Lemmyverse, for finding communities to subscribe to. Not to mention there's a few communities in these places for announcing and promoting new ones, such as [email protected] and [email protected].
For microblogging sites using Mastodon or similar, there's Trunk, Fediverse.info, and Fedi.directory. Also for trying to connect to groups across said sites, there's A.Gup.pe.
It's also commonly recommended to follow hashtags related to your interests, e.g. #SillyTech, but also it doesn't hurt to keep an eye on #FollowFriday. There's also FediFollows that posts regular lists of people and accounts they think may be worth following.
For video sites using Peertube, there's SepiaSearch, and streaming sites using Owncast, there's Owncast Directory.
And if you want to zoom out further, there's Fediverse.observer, where you can see a range of different places using different software to host their communities. It's a great way to explore even further afield.
Think that's all I have for now. Be kindweird, go strange places, share with others, and embrace confusion.
Toss in whatever else you think may be helpful that I'm forgetting/unaware of, keepin' with the attempt to stay on the lighter, non-technical side.
Okay, so now I have a word for this behavior, thanks.
I've managed to avoid seeing it too often but that's also through probably getting lucky with tiny, focused communities and only looking at Subscribed (sometimes Local on certain instances—ani.social has been "safe" for avoiding politics in my opinion). And outright refusing meme communities not because I have an issue with memes but because there's usually a depressing "relatable" one where unfortunately yammering about the cause behind that depressing thing is on-topic, and usually attributed to something political.
I do content discovery through trawling through the community list on an instance and picking something cool and following [email protected]. For people who don't want to mostly take a "my interests only, everything else can be safely ignored" attitude, or whose interests involve topics that frequently intersect with politics (imagine being into tech, seeing on-topic tech news that… also has political implications or directly talks politics), I'm just really sorry for you right now.