Of course, I had been waiting for a while to have a real-life friend also on Hive.
In case I have more friends who come on board later, this set of tips (that is coming to my mind now) can be pretty useful.
You don't need to buy any Hive to get started. In the beginning, someone can delegate some power to you. What delegate means is that he/she is sharing some Hive power with you. You need to Hive Power so that you can get some Resource Credits to post and comment. This can be withdrawn at will without your permission.
If you want to buy some Hive, the easiest is to buy it from Transak. From PeakD.com, get to your wallet and you can see the icon to buy. Using a credit card to buy it is the easiest, though it may be slightly more expensive with the transaction fees. However, starting off with a small amount should be fine as the fees will be negligible. The major exchange that sells Hive is Binance.
You can start with an "introduce yourself" post. Check out some examples: /hot/introduceyourself You don't have to reveal your real name if you don't want to. Remember this is a public blockchain, and things are immutable!
The "Google" service on Hive is https://hivesearcher.com/. You can check out how others go about doing their introductions too.
There are some communities you can post most things to. If it is generic stuff, proofofbrain and neoxian are some you can consider. For crypto and investment related, Leofinance is the king.
Hopefully you are using the Hive Keychain, when you are posting from your computer. By far the easiest in my opinion. Once you are logged in, there are a few sites you can log in from using the same credentials. For example,
https://www.proofofbrain.io/
https://www.neoxian.city/
https://leofinance.io/
A general game plan is to post often, say once a day, and try provide 20 comments on others' posts daily. This way you will get up to speed with the interactions pretty quickly.
Be careful about plagiarism. Always provide the source if possible. For images, either use your own or use one that is royalty-free (e.g., https://pixabay.com/).
Use Hive for your fulfilling your own needs, be it documentation or reflection, and care less about whether upvote your post.
Feel free to ask questions!