Fediverse

You can create an account on a more populated instance, become mutuals with your sibling's wafrn account and then boost stuff for them.

I've never used Tumblr much less its alternatives, but on the Threadiverse side, before PieFed solved the onboarding problem (and I hear that upcoming Lemmy v1.0 may improve things for it too?), it required quite a bit of effort to be the first person on an instance to sign up to a community. For one thing you already had to know the precise name for it, having looked it up elsewhere, and even after the Rexodus often you couldn't even use the community lookup tools to kickstart that and had to resort to direct URL manipulation. (Edit: oh, and the community name most often was not the same as the name displayed for it, with some methods like 3rd-party apps usually not showing the actual name very readily.) And for another thing it can be quite unintuitive to people when signing up does not appear to work right away but instead over the course of several days to like a week the posts start appearing - except not older posts but only newer ones (and not all new ones, but only some, especially when defederations are involved). Therefore I tried to help by signing up for communities whenever I could to help get the smaller instances I was on a head-start, even if I had no interest in them and left them later, just to make it easier for future people to simply click the subscribe button (and even that causes confusion, when some older content is present but then not all of it).

Anyway, the entire Fediverse is newer and the tools often are not so easy to use. It is like using a Linux CLI: quite worthwhile to learn and powerful after you do, even though it requires a rather large investment into learning how. Normally for someone not tech oriented I would strongly suggest to join one of the medium to larger-sized instances (while avoiding the absolute largest of course, to more evenly distribute the load), so that someone else has done the largest majority of this effort, and they can simply enjoy the content and contribute in other ways - voting, commenting, and posting - without being distracted by the underlying technical procedures of how it all works underneath the hood.

Yeah you're going to have to go directly to communities and click on them to start fedirating with them. Someone made a list awhile ago of communities to start with but I don't think I saved the post.

Edit, I did save it! It's an older post so some communities listed might not be as active anymore.

Edit 2, also my instance has a list of all their communities, and some others might as well.

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.

Look into tags.pub. You can follow hashtags and lets you find things according to the topics that interest them.

Start following hashtags

If Wafrn has hardcoded search links, maybe follow a tag from Mastodon with RSS, and set links to redirect to your instance's search?

You can follow Lemmy communities, right? Maybe something like @games@lemmy.world or @movies@piefed.social

Also there's probably some bot accounts that boost posts, maybe you can follow one of those for a while until they start following the people that it boosts. Maybe @MostFollowed@mastodon.social