"After my last long post, I got into some frustrating conversations, among them one in which an open-source guy repeatedly scoffed at the idea of being able to learn anything useful from people on other, less ideologically correct networks. Instead of telling him to go fuck himself, I went to talk to about fedi experiences with people on the very impure Bluesky, where I had seen people casually talking about Mastodon being confusing and weird.
“My purpose in gathering this informal, conversational feedback is to bring voices into the “how should Mastodon be” conversation that don’t otherwise get much attention—which I do because I hope it will help designers and developers and community leaders who genuinely want Mastodon to work for more kinds of people refine their understanding of the problem space.”
The problem with tags is that people actually have to use them or use them correctly, but there are already accounts that just slap as many tags as possible to all of their posts and will keep appearing over and over when you search for something.
The other problem is that you have to find the exact tag that people are using about that same interest, sometimes is easy, sometimes is not, in my experience I haven’t found a tag that I care about enough to follow.
Also the trending tags usually feel dull and repetitive.
Yeah the only problem imo is that people have to use them in their posts. When done correctly it’s hard to beat. If you constantly see people spamming hashtags, just block them. Curate your feed.
It would be great if you could follow a cluster of tags as one topic, but just following each tag as it’s own thing works. I almost prefer following tags over people on Mastodon.
Well like I said, I haven’t found a tag that I care enough to follow, the rest are basically things that nobody toots about or if they do, they don’t use tags because I haven’t seen them.