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 7 hours ago (2 children)

How well do the hashtags work in practice on mastodon? Are they used as intended and actually useful?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

I feel like less common or more specific hashtags tend to work better. If you try to follow common words like art or music or dogs, it can overwhelm your feed and a lot of it is mediocre. If you browse those tags, you might see more specific tags used along side them focusing on what you actually want.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

I can only speak to the topics I followed on another account, but it provided plenty of reading for those topics. Whether it covered all possible posts and whether it works well for all topics, I couldn't say.

It does kind of rely on people tagging things properly, which people might not do if they're on a Mastodon instance specific to that topic. But then, they ought to know that those posts wouldn't Federate well, and indeed, might not want them to.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago

Hashtags still only show you posts that are specifically addressed to users on your host site. They just act as a quick-search feature. You need some kind of "actor" to re-address things to people who aren't following the OP in order to get true propagation across the network. This is what guppe groups do, and what Lemmy communities do.