As a new user, I'm enjoying Mastodon's vibe so far but the one thing that is a letdown is the trending hashtags. I've been checking them regularly over the past couple of weeks and it seems like they're pretty much always like this.
Even on days with big news stories, people on Mastodon are only talking about what day of the week it is like company employees on some internal message board?
Is there anything that can be done to liven them up a bit?
You're right, it is.
However, I'm on a server (fosstodon.org) that has an active Local thread and plenty of users and the trending hashtags still look like this pretty much every day.
for hashtags id say its just not popular, they have fallen out of favor in a lot of groups on twitter as well, for example if you want to know about AI research, not a single AI researcher worth anything is posting with hashtags. You have to find and follow them.
Mastodon being even more indie is just reflecting this growing preference. Hashtags are tools of marketers thanks to twitter and fb, they won't go away but thier cringe factor in casual social posts is likely to stick around for a bit.
Isn't that a problem for Mastodon, then, since it's far more reliant on hashtags to drive discoverability due to the lack of algorithm?
It's fundamental to mastodon.. you can subscribe to hashtags, you can search hashtags, but you can't (usually) search posts directly. That works for the most part, but does limit discoverability slightly.
Groups seem to be the new hotness, though.. there are some 3rd party implementations already but a proper implementation in the core is upcoming: https://joinmastodon.org/roadmap
maybe, communities and forums worked great for decades before hashtags became common. Some might say its a cope for cheap and poorly developed search algos soon to be replaced by much more sophisticated systems.