Welcome, new people!
Ways to find people to follow, aside from reading the local feed:
1. write an #introductions post, and hashtag the things you're interested in. You can't search by keywords, you can only search hashtags.
2. search for hashtags of things that interest you.
2a. your instance will only search hashtags on federated toots, so to find more, go to a large instance and search their hashtags. Edit this URL: https://mastodon.social/tags/knitting