I always feel as if I am forgetting someone and then they will pop up on my feed and I'll see them. I am bad in that sense, but I do have a core of a few people I love to check in with everyday.
Being an artist myself, I tend to follow daily mostly other artists, but I also love to garden and raise chickens so I have a few homesteaders I like to see daily as well. But, there are people that slip through the cracks and then I find them again and think, "I wish there was a better way to stay abreast of their posts".
In many ways Steemit can seem full of things I don't understand. I still don't understand the voting bots, how they work etc. I tend to just post daily even if it's just a doodle, and then spend some time reading the people I like and find for the day, not a very good strategy I am sure, but I know what you mean about thousands of following. I'm at just under 500 and I can't keep up. I sometimes think about going through and deleting those I haven't seen or who have sort of fallen off the Steemit map, but then that becomes a chore that takes me away from making more creative stuff which is what I like to share whilst on Steemit myself, so then I just forget about it and go back to drawing :)
When I joined, last July, I didn't even know what it was. I just joined because my hubby @winstonalden was on it and was always telling me about it, but I didn't really get it. Then when I did post I never did the things I was supposed to do. I never did a proper, introduce yourself post.
It wasn't until 1 January of this year that I started posting almost daily, as I set it as one of my New Years resolutions, and haven't looked back and have really enjoyed it. I make it part of my daily art schedule so that sort of helps to keep that in focus as well. Over all I am VERY happy to have found steemit and would love to see other such platforms appear and see less Facebooks :)