Find a hobby you like and look for local groups of people / classes in that hobby. With time you will make personal connections with people in that group.

Could be workouts, activism, trekking, board games, knitting, book club, debates. Anything that does not involve staring at a screen.

What do you mean? Can you sort your mastodon feed in any way other than the equivalent of “new” in lemmy?

I think the lack of a sorting algorithm in mastodon will make it hard for something like the BBC to gain a lot of followers. They put out so many posts that it will dominate any feed and overshadow friends that post once a day or so.

Ruskdesk works perfectly in my expiriece. Any reason that it didn’t fully satisfy you?