Well, I am not on Mastodon myself, because twitter-like social media isn't my cup of tea, but from what I heard, engagement there seems to happen much more on a following-hashtags level than following-users level, so maybe (ab)using hashtags more might do the trick.
Nowadays, definitely. 4 years ago, when this was originally posted? Back when I first engaged a little bit here before hibernating until the big exodus, my most engaged post had like 30-something upvotes.