@spencer New in Mastodon 4.0 and already in place in some other forks such as Glitch soc and so on is the ability to follow hashtags as if they were people. I went to the search and followed #cats #caturday #catsofmastodon and #catpics and haven't regretted it for a moment. You'll get lots on your timeline if you do that. If you don't have that feature yet, you can usually add them to tabs in the advanced view and to a separate tab in some mobile clients.
@hypolite Interesting. I was attempting to allow for that with the mention of other forks just as glitch, but I didn't know there were non-forks that were still federating with Mastodon through ActivityPub. (I'd also never heard of Friendica.) That's nifty! In any case, yeah, I have no idea if you can follow hash tags on Friendica or not. I did attempt to look at the features page, but it kept erroring out. :(
@spencer