Earlier quoted context omitted.
Need to have people on your home node following people on the other node for your own node to be aware. Really unfriendly to small nodes / people who run their own personal nodes.
The idea is to have a view built by the connections people on your instance make. The view from tech.lgbt is different from the view from photog.social, and that's a feature. Smaller nodes can subscribe to relays if they find it too limiting.
I looked at: a) https://mstdn.social/tags/opensource b) https://tech.lgbt/tags/opensource c) https://photog.social/tags/opensource
They look completely identical, the feature isn't working.
I'm sceptical it's even an intended feature as much as just the overall result of the protocol design not putting too much thought into it.
> Smaller nodes can subscribe to relays if they find it too limiting.
I looked into it, that's actually a better solution than the old one I was aware of which involved a bot account automatically subscribing to different accounts across the fediverse. It's my understanding that needs to be explicitly configured by a Mastodon administrator for a subscription though, out of the hands of the user.
This still isn't particularly user friendly and I still think this is a terrible user experience, particularly when comments like these appear:
>>>> Hashtags play a huge role on Mastodon - discover people by following hashtags
>>> I'm probably twiddling the wrong buttons or something but whenever I've clicked on a Fediverse hashtag, it's always just been the hashtag on the originating server. Is there a way to get a wider view that I've missed?