Here's something really useful I've found.

One of the great things about the Fediverse is being able to follow hashtags.

But.

If someone puts up a post using that hashtag, and no-one on your instance follows that person or anyone who shares it, it won't appear in your feed.

This is particularly common if you're on a small or single-user instance.

Here's the solution.

First, follow @_followback

It will follow you back.

And then tags.pub bot then reshare all of your posts that use hashtags.

So if you do a post with the hashtag #Fediverse, then @fediverse will share your post.

Here's where the magic happens.

The tags.pub bot will do the same thing to everyone else who follows that followback account.

So if you follow @fediverse, then you'll get a feed of everyone who uses #Fediverse on the Fediverse.

And you'll see their posts even if no-one on your instance follows them.

And it works for all hashtags.

Just put the name of the hashtag, followed by @tags.pub

So @tech follows all posts using #tech, for example.

Or @news follows all posts using #news

#relay #relays #selfhosted #selfhosting #Mastodon #feditip #feditips #fedihelp
@aj this sounds phenomenal, ta for sharing [how did you discover it?]. am about to test it on my small friendica.au instance... the main reason i left it a few weeks back & returned to masto, was exactly this -- most of my followed tags had few hits there for the reason you explained. 🤞 🤞 🤞
@MsDropbear42 I saw a post about it the other day by @evan

So I decided to try a bunch of hashtags with it.

Since I'm on a single-user self-hosted instance, it's brilliant.