The Verge: “Mastodon has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of Twitter’s ongoing meltdown, and since I started seriously using it late last year, it’s won me over. While I still use Twitter for monitoring news and talking to the occasional source, Mastodon is my new home for shortform posting. But Mastodon has one significant problem: it’s very annoying to find things I like. I’m not talking about “discoverability” in the sense of some tailored suggestion algorithm. I mean that by design, information on Mastodon’s many servers is diffuse and relatively obscure. Back on Twitter, I kept several columns of search terms open — some for serious topics I was covering, some for personal interests like my favorite games, all of them a potential gateway to an interesting new corner of the service. Mastodon deliberately disallows plaintext search, and despite some attempts to devise an opt-in system for it, the main alternative so far is hashtags. Mastodon lets you search for hashtags or keep columns open to track them. In addition to basic topic headings like #politics or #music, people write posts with tags like #LawFedi or #lawstodon for legal posts, #introduction for people joining the service, or #CatsOfMastodon for… you probably get the idea…”