AFAIK, Mastodon has exactly the same experience as BS if you just download the Mastodon official client and pick the main mastodon.social instance.

And as far as finding people to follow, just follow some hashtags to start with. Like #boston should immediately got you local users and news and #mac for computer news, etc etc. Following 5 or 10 hashtags will get you a pretty strong initial feed on mastodon.social, I suspect.