Are you looking for conversations in your local server, cause those are generally not what I use Mastodon for, though they were a good start to find people that I should follow and curate my list of media for my own.
I'm a queer person in tech, so I joined tech.lgbt, which led to the people there regularly boosting content related to those topics that led me to find the people I wanted to follow. It rook a while to slowly build a sizable list of people, but I'm now sitting comfortably at just under 100 which plenty of content to wade through daily.