this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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Unlike Twitter, hashtags don't perform a global search, they only perform a local search on the content that people have pulled into your instance via subscriptions; this is a downside of it's federated nature. So what you are finding out is essentially that people on your instance don't share your interests.
If you want to improve your feed, you should look for instances where people who are interested in the same kinds of things as you congregate, and subscribe to the people there who interest you. If you find an instance whose community really clicks with you, you might consider switching to it, and then the hashtags will work better for you.
In general, it helps to model the fediverse as being not one community but a big community made up of a bunch of smaller communities that all talk to each other, so it's more like a Twitter alternative than a Twitter replacement (even though it is sometimes sold as the later rather than the former). Personally, I find Mastodon to be infinitely better than Twitter, but that's just because I personally never used Twitter due to lack of interest so I don't have a basis for comparison. :-)
Is there no way to search hash tags across all instances at all? It seems like someone should figure that out. The ui has that connotation given how search works historically on other sites.
On a federated server system layout, that search would be tremendously computationally/network intensive as it would require somehow finding out all instances and communities within each instance and repolling the servers to get that info periodically to ensure the list is updated. A better approach would be an app (on your mobile or hosted somewhere) that would maintain a list of servers and would do that query outside of the servers that handle conversations.
Although search on a federated system seems to be almost impossible to implement at this point, I think it is a crucial step in taking back the web.
What I mean with this is: most of the people that are on the Fediverse right now seem to look very fondly on the World Wide Web as it was a decade ago. Before Social Media became gated communities, support for RSS was dropped everywhere, corporations found out that the web could be used for advertisements and tracking mechanisms were implemented.
Reddit has - until this summer - been a corner of the web where some of us still found valuable information and held discussions with real people. Back in the good old days we had homepages and blogs that we subscribed to and searched through. On Reddit we had our subreddits.
When I was looking for a discussion on a niche topic (or even honest product experience) I used
my search term site:reddit.comon Google all the time. This basically meant: I'm only concerned for the part of the World Wide Web that is reddit.com and not deluted by corporate / seo / influencer bullshit.With the Fediverse hopefully taking Reddit's place, how do we go on from here? How do we narrow down our search scope to the useful part of the web nowadays?