@julian I recently got interested in building topic-first discovery of content/conversations (Slack/Discord-like groupchat rather than "microblogging" which emphasizes recency and user identity). I ended up relying on Mastodon's hashtags (which users can already subscribe/follow), and elevating them in the user interface (a Slack-like sidebar which lists user's followed hashtags). But this bakes in certain expectations about topics/hashtags - how permanent and universal they are. Forking out a subset of the conversations into a new "topic" raises so many questions. "Topics" really is a big can of worms.

Another frustration I ran into with Zulip requiring a "topic" for every new thread was, how much user friction it introduces. Discord solved it by automatically inferring a topic or thread title whenever a thread is created. Would like to see more of this (more organized content, without burdening the user but still allowing them to re-organize).

I am interested in this topic. Please add me to relevant groups/calls. My mastodon ID is: @[email protected]

How do I catch up on the current state of things? All I know is that Mastodon and some other software allows subscribing to hashtags: https://fedi.tips/how-do-i-follow-hashtags-on-mastodon-and-the-fediverse/

But this is neither universal nor sufficient. Each community might use different hashtags for different "topics".