Hello. My younger sibling has recently created an account on a small Wafrn instance (we avoided the main one due to them being too young). However they’re now facing the problem that I faced back when I briefly joined a small Mastodon instance way back: there’s very few posts, and almost nothing is federated; it feels very barren so they’re not really using it and spending most of their time on Tumblr (which is what they want to avoid). What can be done to find more people to interact with and follow on smaller instances?
If it’s your own instance, make a bot account who can follow a few interesting accounts from other instances. That way the local timeline gets filled a bit, and it’s not so lonely.
A few things around this, to gain traction, a person needs to have 5-6 accounts to interract with regularly, before they catch the addiction. But if those accounts are active, they’ll quickly get out there, into a big bad world.
Depending on their age, have regular sessions with them. Go pick up an interest - a hashtag, a specific prolific creators’ timeline, something like that. If you spend a bit of effort, this is easy to schedule. Point out the bad actors, point out the funny memes. Ask them how’d they respond. Teach them what a social network can be, and what they can do there.