I'm trying to understand the way Mastodon works. Back in the day I started with IRC and then the many php-based forums and then reddit which led to lemmy. I never used twitter or similar platforms.
My understanding (and this is where I need help) is that all of the above are topic-based, whereas Mastodon is person-based? What I mean is that on lemmy I subscribe to things based on topic and I don't really care about usernames or user profiles, I only care about discussing a topic. It seems to me like Mastodon is the opposite? You follow persons and what they might say about any topic?
Is there something I'm missing here? Are hashtags close enough to sorting it by topic that it works just like a topic based platform? Is this difference inherent or just in my head because I don't understand Mastodon?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 hours ago

mastodon is essentially 'twitter'. also called 'microblogging'. people post things that other people can see because they subscribe to 'people'

the hashtags are supposed to be used to aggregate posts between all those different people to help find common posts.

lemmy does none of it, as it is not capable of 'microblogging'

there are a few platforms that can do both the 'forum based' stuff (threadiverse) and the 'twitter based stuff' (microblog) like mbin

on my instance for example, you can follow people on mastodon and interact with all the lemmy content