This may be well intentioned but it is not an ideal solution.

In an ideal scenario, you’d ask users for their interest, and based on their selections recommend accounts that talk about those things.

One way we can solve partially for this is to recommend RSS feeds based on popular publications. If existing users interact with those feeds by quoting articles and or posting under them (probably less likely than quoting), then newbies can discover people who talk about those subjects.

I know it’s kind of a half-ass measure but it’s better than nothing. Another would be to recommend hashtags (though people don’t seem to use those as often — and I too, forget).

Autofollow is a not a good UX pattern. You are basically forcing the user to follow someone they may have no interest in following, developer or not. It doesn’t matter that they made the client, it’s up to the user to decide who to follow. By asking users for their interests in onboarding we can surface more relevant users and content 🙌