General advice for people coming over from Twitter and Instagram regarding hashtags:
Hashtags are a useful and important tool here. Clicking on a hashtag will show you results from across different servers, so they're important for federating content and finding people.
There's no need to have loads of tags on your post like Insta to try to catch more engagement, but also you won't be punished for using tags like Twitter.
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Using one general tag (like # MastoArt or Photography)and 1-2 topic-specific tags (like # blender3d or krita) on your posts is enough.
We specifically don't like you using tags that don't belong on your content in order to try to get more views; that's not how mastodon works. If people click a caturday tag, they want to see cats.
We also have more granular tags that serve specific functions, like the #CuratorPrompts tag is only for art directly related to those prompts.
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For accessibility reasons, if you're stringing words together into hashtags, please use CamelCase (where the first letter of each word is uppercase), and include articles - so ACupOfSoup rather than ACupofSoup. This helps people with things like dyslexia, and also some screenreaders that will try to read the whole thing as one word without the separation with uppercase.A^.^
(Also, don't assume people don't know about hashtags and tag their posts in replies for discoverability. Ask first.)
Mastodonâ˘ART đ¨ Curator
Darth Biomech