Moreover, in English “to look” has a meaning that may be somehow similar to “search” or “go through”, while in Italian this is not true, you would use a different verb, so it could be evn more on my side than yours.

Coming to your question, I want to add that the advantage is that, by being patient, my timeline in mastodon is now well crafted, informative, enjoyable and effective, in contrast to what I got on traditional socials where I tend to scroll indefinitely with my brain turned off. What I mean is that it pays off

I’m blind, in the blind community, and follow lots of others in that community, so I just needed to look through people’s followers

Sorry, I know this is stupid, but I found this sentence really funny 😳

Coming to your question, there are already a lot of valid suggestions, what I want to add is: it can take a bit of time, tell your friends to not immediately give up. It takes time because there is less people, so somewhat less interesting stuff. It takes time because there is no algorithm suggesting what you should follow. But if they can start with a small amount of interesting accounts, they will find that their boost will probably be from other interesting accounts that they can then follow, until the timeline becomes interesting. Just be patient :-)