Hashtags do not replace groups.
No one moderates them. They’re easy to hijack and spam. And there’s simply no permanence to them.
Which is why, if you actually want to discuss something, it’s better to tag a group. For example, if you want to be part of an actual PC gaming community on the Fediverse, it’s better to tag @pcgaming@lemmy.ca than #pcgaming.
This needs to be common knowledge because people new to the Fediverse do not know about groups. Hell, I’d say people who have had Mastodon accounts for years still don’t know. And that’s a shame.
@fediverse@lemmy.world
Which I would never respond to on Mastodon, as it’s terrible for discussions.
Mastodon is terrible for topical discussions because people don’t use groups. But they can if they knew how to use them.
You may say the system was not designed for cross-pollination, but the fundamental system is not Mastodon, and it’s not Lemmy: it’s ActivityPub.
Now do all these apps implement ActivityPub imperfectly? Yes. But eventually, some app will get it right—ideally one that will let you choose your preferred UI/UX on the fly.
That would be cool. Might be useful. Not sure it’s really possible.
Not only is it possible, there’s lots of Fediverse software that’s just designed to be a “dumb server” akin to Nginx. For example, appy:
https://appy.cat/
Now the reason this stuff hasn’t caught fire yet is because we’re just now moving away from “Fediverse = Mastodon”. So the idea of federation itself isn’t just a paradigm shift, it’s a complete system shock that disrupts our mental models for how social media is supposed to work.
That’s entirely dependent on the interface switching, or some kind of universal interface. That’s the part I have serous doubts about. Keep in mind you have to make a single interface that work better than all the others on their respective native systems. I’m not sure that’s possible.
You don’t need to make a single interface, just a “meta-interface” that allows you to switch UIs on the fly.
That’s entirely doable within a client.