Jerry

As one Admin to another, I'm sad to hear that we're losing a good instance. And, I'm sorry that people ruined your fun.

Thanks for all you've done. All the best to you.

The key word here is "connected" instances. You don't find hashtag-related posts from all the servers, just the servers that your server is connected to and also only posts that your server has seen from other servers.

This is why, on my instance, I relay with over 300 other instances, some of them are the larger ones. All the posts they see on their server are duplicated onto my smaller server. The impact is that while my server is small, it has the same messages as one of the large servers which makes for a better experience. Note that Mastodon.social does not relay with any other instance. Not that most instances could possibly hold all their posts and accounts anyway.

When I search for hashtags on my instance, I do get a lot of hits.

Many smaller servers do not relay as much as I do, or at all, because it requires disk space to store all the posts, images, and accounts that are streaming in constantly from all these other servers. I don't have these concerns because I have unlimited capacity. So, the experience will vary depending on which server your account is on.

You have to use hashtags on Mastodon if you want your messages to be seen because there is no AI to fill timelines. People follow hashtags and search for them. Then you'll get likes and boosts.

And, you control your own timeline by following hashtags, following people, and searching for hashtags. This way, unlike Twitter, your timeline only has posts that you are interested in. Once you get this set up, it's quite nice to only see posts that you like reading, without advertising and without posts meant to enrage you.

Also you can use https://fedi.directory to find great people to follow.

There were two screen shots. I saw them. At least one of them was doctored. That is all anybody knows. How are some people so certain which Admin doctored the screen shot?

RE: it seems like the only way to have a reasonable chance of getting decent results for hashtag searches is to be on the biggest server

Well, yes, and no. You can relay with other Mastodon instances and they will share there traffic with you so that people on your instance will have the same content as on their instances PLUS the traffic from all the other instances that are relaying with them as well. So, your server will see a ton of stuff. No shortage of stuff coming in

There's a number of good relays. I recommend these two at a minimum:

https://relay.infosec.exchange/inbox
https://bigrelay.social/inbox

In the Administration section, there's a Relay page where you can put these in.

For the first one, @Jerry is the person to contact if it doesn't enable for you. Not sure how many instances relay with him, but it must be a large number.

For the second one, which currently has 328 instances connected together, you can get more information at https://bigrelay.social/

Hope this helps