I recently tried to join Mastodon, and like Twitter before it, I don’t understand the premise. You follow individuals instead of topics, and if you try to follow hashtags they change on a whim all the time so you’re unlikely to get relevant posts.
Am I missing something, or is the purpose just to shout your opinions into the void? Could any Twitter/Mastodon users explain it to me like I’m 4?
Twitter in the old days and Mastodon now I treat as custom news feeds, you subscribe to people or entities you’re interested in hearing news from and there you have it. I find it much less useful as a platform for having discussions or browsing for pleasure than Reddit in the old days and Lemmy now, which as you say is topic-focused rather than individual focused.