> The recommendations don't seem to work.
  > There is no algorithm to show me miscellaneous content.

Not sure which recommendations sdf.org has, but imo the lack of an algorithm is a bonus.

My advice to find content is to browse #introductions and find hashtags for topics you're interested in, and then follow those hashtags and browse them for people you find interesting and follow them directly as well.

> imo the lack of an algorithm is a bonus.

For me it's a negative. I want the site to guess what I want to see and give me content accordingly, rather than me having to choose

The idea is that you would subscribe to hashtags to see what people talk about. Or you can go in "Local"/"Federated" and you see what people talk about in your instance or within their network. But it's all chronological, there's indeed no algo to tell you who to follow (Twitter used to be like that, you'd show up to an empty feed basically)

Not sure why it is that slow, might be the server? Mine is quite fast and followed the WWDC keynote in real time with sometimes dozens of toots a minute

Follow #hashtags that you are interested in to get a broad slice of miscellaneous content, and also check the "trending locally" page from time to time (showing posts that are popular on your instance).

#bookstodon #rust #programming #go are some good ones. #maths is excellent (but I'm in maths grad school). There's a growing number of sharp wits and interesting bots to follow. For sure the content exceed my time budget for entertaining social media. I haven't tried getting targeted answers by asking Mastodon, so I can't comment about that.