That falls into "good problems to have" territory. A platform where following a (relatively) popular simple tag means "you will get flooded" is also the one where you can have similar engagement numbers/followers as Twitter does today.
I never really subscribed to hashtags in the first place. Always seem to be filled with spam. On twitter, I just follow a few interesting people and they'll usually tweet or retweet interesting stuff, so it works out.
Most people have a range of interests, and most interests have a range of people. If you follow people you'll see stuff you don't like, and if you follow hashtags then as soon as they get popular they get hijacked by entryists. Plus the site is optimised for ragebait - that's the natural result of the emphasis on short posts and the algorithm that optimises for "engagement" - so even if you're following the right people and the right hashtags you'll still see the worst parts of them.
How do people usually consume hashtags?
My Twitter usage is going to the homepage and looking at my feed, which is just posts from people I follow. I don't see how having certain hashtags would make it more likely for me to see a post.
This is such a gross simplification. First, even people who you follow might post both wanted and unwanted content, and the platform will be more useful if it can somehow show me the things I want to see. Second, it overlooks content creator side of things. How does a new person without any followers start gaining them, or vice-versa a new person who doesn't know whom to follow yet. People keep saying this is what they want from Twitter. But Twitter is not only for them, it is valuable for these other use cases.
It's not. I follow a fairly small # of people (~500) and getting people to reliably show up in is a long-running problem. Following is not enough, you have to favorite or somehow interact with them sufficiently to be sure of seeing all their tweets. It's quite annoying.
You use the hashtags that match your interests, eg I wanted more Python content in my timeline so I typed #python into the search box at mastodon.online and followed the tag. I didn't need to use an external site for this, just the Mastodon site.
Now I'm seeing posts from people discussing Python stuff which gives me a pool of people to choose to follow. Now that I've got some people populating my timeline I can unfollow the tag if I decide it gets too noisy.
No. If you want to follow many people you can't follow people who post frequently. I happen to be able to (TweetDeck helps a lot). It's a tooling problem, not a service problem.
Following a hashtag in realtime is only useful if it's something with somewhat low volume and on a topic that spammers wouldn't bother with. For example the #pycon hashtag was quite useful during the PyCon conference. Most of the time however hashtags are useful to easily identify what a tweet from someone you already follow is about, and can be handy I think when you need to skim through a decent number of tweets.
I've tried this tool for a while to generate more engagement. I create fashion watches for men and automatically like posts under tags like #mensfashion, #gardannewatches (my own watch brand) etc.
This have helped me gain so much more traction than I ever could manually. But if you'll try it - be careful. It's easy to use it in the wrong way and act spammy!
"followers" - not "friends." And not necessarily - think about supply and demand. There are a limited number of twitter accounts. If you happen to have a good twitter account name, it may attract many followers and be of value.
Plus, it isn't easy to get that many followers. You can't just sign up and make it happen. I think the number of followers would be of value from at least an advertising perspective.
I agree. I just recently signed up for the very first time, simply because news stories seem to break on twitter first. I can't see why I would bother with personal followers. Seems to work great, like you said, as a central place to receive updates for You Tube channels, journalists and industry experts.
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