musing about hashtags, fediblock meta, long oops
@greyor@weirder.earth hmm not entirely sure I agree — twitter has had fulltext search for a while which significantly decreased the utility of hashtags & my extremely non-expert observation is that tag usage declined pretty sharply as a result. Meanwhile most other microblogging sites (eg. tumblr, instagram) maintained tags as a core feature and developed culturally specific conventions around them (tagging a tumblr post like an insta post and vice versa will net poor results) which indicates that tagging as a method of finding posts on a topic / other people who are interested in a topic is a frequent need or microblogging style social networks
My take is
1) Hashtags are the shittiest kind of tag and the only reason mastodon uses them is because Gargron still can’t let go of twitter — the users themselves are fine
2) Tags on fedi seem to me to be most useful for finding new people to follow with shared interests (eg people putting lots of tags in their intro posts, these are often very standard proper nouns so people can easily find them) and creating collective ongoing opt-in conversations around a particular subject (these are more more likely to be a bit odd because distinctiveness is prioritized over random peoples ability to find and use the tag, eg #florespondence or #SilentSunday ).
Type one tags do contain many new users (bc new users are most in need of people to follow & get followed by) who are probably also shaky on site culture in other ways. If you’re not looking for new connections these tags will mostly seem pointless. Totally legit to just ignore them. Type two does contain some hashtags that are communities importing the tags they use from other sites (eg. I use #Ao3TagOfTheDay which I brought with me from Tumblr) but also a large number of hashtags native to mastodon that see regular use by well established accounts. Still may not be ones thing of course—they’re generally not useful outside of the group that created them! But a decidedly different beast than type one tags in terms of usage patterns.
