I recently tried to join Mastodon, and like Twitter before it, I don’t understand the premise. You follow individuals instead of topics, and if you try to follow hashtags they change on a whim all the time so you’re unlikely to get relevant posts.
Am I missing something, or is the purpose just to shout your opinions into the void? Could any Twitter/Mastodon users explain it to me like I’m 4?
Unlike Twitter, Mastodon seems to rely much more on stable hashtags for discovery. That’s probably because there’s no “the algorithm” like on Twitter. So with Mastodon you very well can subscribe to hashtags and expect them to get reused over time.