As a new user, I'm enjoying Mastodon's vibe so far but the one thing that is a letdown is the trending hashtags. I've been checking them regularly over the past couple of weeks and it seems like they're pretty much always like this.
Even on days with big news stories, people on Mastodon are only talking about what day of the week it is like company employees on some internal message board?
Is there anything that can be done to liven them up a bit?
Isn't that a problem for Mastodon, then, since it's far more reliant on hashtags to drive discoverability due to the lack of algorithm?
It's fundamental to mastodon.. you can subscribe to hashtags, you can search hashtags, but you can't (usually) search posts directly. That works for the most part, but does limit discoverability slightly.
Groups seem to be the new hotness, though.. there are some 3rd party implementations already but a proper implementation in the core is upcoming: https://joinmastodon.org/roadmap
maybe, communities and forums worked great for decades before hashtags became common. Some might say its a cope for cheap and poorly developed search algos soon to be replaced by much more sophisticated systems.