There’s no algorithm, so just posting content isn’t enough. If you don’t follow people on other servers you won’t see anything in the feed, and reply threads will be empty. It took a while to find the right people to follow but now I get as much out of it as I used to get from Twitter. Hashtags are a lot more important too for discoverability since there’s no search function.

My engagement is still low, but on Twitter I would post something and it would just never get seen. Now at least a couple of people will often reply.