You discover things when people you follow boost them or (if you're on an instance that's not too big for it to be usable) you see them on the federated timeline.
the experience is quite a bit different from twitter. a good mastodon server has mods , admins, and a community who moderate.
the signal to noise ratio is significantly better—maybe a decent comparison would be to compare here (hn) and a default sub on reddit with very little moderation—sure, you _can_ find interesting gems of a dialogue on the little moderated reddit sub, but your odds are significantly higher of finding good conversations here on hn. very very different experience.
