something i never see people talk about for fresh instances on masto is the work that goes into pathmaking.
when your instance is fresh it doesn't know any other instances - someone has to do the work to go "find" the posts for the first time to bring them back home.
the best way i've found, which i have spent so many hours doing, is going through whatever follow lists i can, seeing who in there has a semi-active account and following it, just so i could have more selection to choose from moving forward
@coffeentacos i saw that when i first made my instance - i realized quickly that no one uses that function lol
@exiliaex ahh, I would’ve thought they’d be well used
@coffeentacos @exiliaex yeah, I have yet to find a Mastodon instance where that's enabled. the one other Pleroma instance I know of and would follow has it enabled, though, which is handy.
you can use https://relay.fedi.buzz/ to force the issue for Mastodon hosts that don't support actual relays, with only a slight bit of hack feel to it (everything shows up as a post repeat)
@exiliaex I’ve seen some admins talk about relays and stuff to get that going but I don’t know much about how it works