[VectorLock]

I don't think the hashtags are a great experience. Common hashtags get overloaded with junk, how do you know which hashtags to use, you need to register with some external service (and find out about it) like fediverse.info which I've found to be a pretty clunky experience. These are the kind of ergonomic wrinkles I was thinking about.

[defulmere]

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.