Tiny Mastodon Newbie Tip 🐘:'nOn Mastodon, you can not only follow people but you can also follow hashtags!

[em0nm4stodon@infosec.exchange]

Tiny Mastodon Newbie Tip 🐘:

On Mastodon, you can not only follow people but you can also follow hashtags!

This is an amazing feature to keep receiving fresh toots (posts) about the topics that interest you.

HOW TO ❓

1. On desktop, type a topic that interests you in the upper left “Search or paste URL” field and press Enter. Type all the words together without space if there is more than one word, for example type “StarTrek” 🖖

2. In the “Search results”, click on the “Hashtags” tab. Click on the hashtag that interests you 🔍

3. On the hashtag results, click on the “Follow hashtag” button the upper right, it is a small icon of a human figure with a plus sign 👤➕

4. Toots using this hashtag will now show up in your “Home” timeline! Repeat with more hashtags as desired 🏠

5. Magic! ✨

#TinyMastodonTip

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@Em0nM4stodon that's an excellent advice, doubly more so for newcomers who still need to build their follow lists.

And one thing to be aware of, for those less familiar with how federation works, is that this presents only posts with the appropriate hashtags that were either boosted by or written by accounts followed by someone on your instance. So there will be posts with that hashtag in the Fediverse that will not reach you.

[oblomov@sociale.network]

@Em0nM4stodon (I feel the need to remark this because I know a lot of people who were initially confused by this particular aspect, especially “in reverse”: «why are my properly-tagged posts not being found?» and the reason at first is probably that nobody follows you yet so the posts don't circulate beyond the local instance. This is also one of the reasons why the choice of instance matters.)