I recently tried to join Mastodon, and like Twitter before it, I don’t understand the premise. You follow individuals instead of topics, and if you try to follow hashtags they change on a whim all the time so you’re unlikely to get relevant posts.
Am I missing something, or is the purpose just to shout your opinions into the void? Could any Twitter/Mastodon users explain it to me like I’m 4?
At its best, twitter was group texting, but in public. its evolved into a semi-broadcast form with the expectation that many will read and few will engage, and in both twitter and mastodon the tooling is built for that.
within that, you follow people because they produce content you want, or because you intend to interact. Hashtags are there for topics you are intersted in so you can consume in a more ad-hoc way