People mention a lot how important hashtags are for discovery on mastodon/fedi, but one thing I never see mentioned is that when you follow or search for an HT, you only get results from posts that have federated to your instance (ie posts made/boosted by someone at least one person on your instance follows).
On huge instances, nbd; but on smaller ones, HTs may seem significantly less active than they really are.
If you like following HTs, boosting HTed posts makes it a more effective feature.
@jepyang I guess. I’ll try encouraging them more on mine.
They’re just so exploitable.
@JoshuaACNewman Fwiw, I’m kinda neutral on hashtags themselves. I know a lot of people don’t like them for various reasons, and in general I think their utility is kind of overstated to newbies. If you don’t end up on a huge instance (and that’s probably for the best) then it’s probably confusing why everyone’s telling you to use HTs but nothing shows up on your HT searches.
But if you *do* like HTs, then boosting your favorites helps propagate them across the fedi.
moonwife
Joshua A.C. Newman