What I did in 2018 was

1. picked an instance where the local timeline looked interesting/relevant to some of my personal interests
2. looked through there and also #hashtags for my interests
3. through those avenues, followed everybody who looked remotely interesting at all! With the understanding that I was going to start big and some of those people probably wouldn't accept my follow, and some of them probably wouldn't turn out to be interesting to me/compatible in the end so I would remove my follow.

I feel like casting a wide net and filtering down to match your own taste and the kind of people you want to meet is a good way to start curating the Mastodon you personally want to see, since an algorithm isn't going to do it for you. It takes time but is rewarding in the end. With Masto in specific, most instances by now have upgraded software to the point where migration tools are available, so if you end up not even liking your local timeline you can take all your followers, follows, blocks etc and just try someplace else.

You could probably also use lists to help with this process somehow but I never really understood them either here or on Twitter lol.

I've been on Mastodon for several years, most of it on a singular instance (well before the Twitter migration). You definitely have to go looking for your own list of interesting people to follow, and the hashtags are quieter than I'd like, but I enjoy it as a chill place to just hang out and read fun stuff and occasionally have low stakes conversations.

I've tried a few other fediverse services but none have really stuck with me except for probably now Lemmy and Kbin.

I feel awful for those being laid off, but honestly this was inevitably coming for SWTOR sooner or later. I'm just thankful they aren't outright shutting it down. My personal experience of the game is that it was never a great MMO, but it's an excellent single player game with occasional multiplayer interaction. I've gone back multiple times just to replay the numerous single player storylines.

Yeah we already went through this exact thing with Masto and Twitter. The complaining about defed is particularly annoying to me, like... defederation is a feature of the fediverse, not a bug, lol... Hopefully the "this doesn't work exactly like MyFavoriteSite" folks will clear out eventually like the last wave.

Can't believe we're coming up on the 11th anniversary soon. This has always been my favorite MMO.

If you like MMOs and other multiplayer games, https://massivelyop.com/ is very good. Talented writers funded by reader donations.

It will use ActivityPub

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

Trusting this thing would always be a bad idea.