Tools help, and because the Fediverse API is completely accessible, folks have already come up with awesome stuff.

• Populate your following list by finding friends, the Fedifinder still appears to work and helps find friends from Twitter on Masto: https://fedifinder.glitch.me/
• Now find friends of friends, the wider social graph. Followgraph works wonders: https://followgraph.vercel.app/
• Now you will likely miss posts, so try following updates of people if you really enjoy their content, plus of course pinning hashtags. PLUS. Up your game with an algorithm, either in the dedicated Mastodon app (trending posts) or with more customisation through the app Fediview: https://fediview.com/ Using Mastodon Digest (GitHub), you could also set up your own automation script.
• Folks have created lists and groups you can mass subscribe. The most successful one I know is from and for academics, perhaps there is a field for you in there. Journalists have similar stuff. See https://github.com/nathanlesage/academics-on-mastodon
• There are many awesome apps out there to access your content, improving the experience. I recommend Phanpy because of its unique and sleek design, see https://phanpy.social/. If you miss Quote Tweets and other stuff, try an app like Elk.
• Mastodon is only one option, if you want all of Twitter’s tools and more cool stuff, try Firefish. You can migrate followers and posts. This way, you can skip many external tools.

And that’s just the beginning.

Underrated comment. Posteo is awesome, cheap, and has all the tools you need for mail and calendar things. Proton may give you more, but that’s a different query.

Yes, a while back, but it appears to be lacking key features, see here. This comes from the GrapheneOS circles. https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html

Not an expert though, updates or critique highly welcome.

And, crucially, security. It is far behind, on desktop and especially mobile. Process isolation aka sandboxing is superior on Chrome platforms. Unfortunately.

Wow, this is a bonkers project, love it!

Thanks, this is the way to go. Since my project is for research and testing purposes, however, I might check out multiple setups and compare results. A follow-up post sounds about right.

I need a bit of spare time to start working on that soon-ish.

Excellent, thanks for sharing your journey. Some servers could “never handle it” because of all the caching and redundancies?

Slowly I am becoming aware of the limitations of Mastodon, which are also closely related to the managament, it seems, shy of listening to the people. Rebased sounds like my favourite so far, although GoToSocial, as mentioned by @slowwcore@lemmy.fmhy.ml (and folks on Masto) is also worth exploring.