Hashtags have been pretty helpful to me on Mastodon. If people tag their stuff with the tags I follow I get a chance to see me stuff and follow new people organically, while people who didn’t want to be discovered never hit my radar. Making that kind of topic tagging easier for people to apply might be useful, as I’ve seen new arrivals to the Fediverse who can’t figure out why nobody sees them until someone tells them to tag their stuff.
The only reason I had a Twitter account was because there was an emergency event in my local area and Twitter was the one place I could get information about it right now. There were locals sharing what they knew, emergency services telling people what measures needed to be taken where, and journalists on the ground saying what they knew in real time. It was invaluable.
When I left Twitter, that ability to follow breaking news as it happens was the thing I was afraid I’d miss out on most. It’s bittersweet to find out that I didn’t need to worry about that after all.
If I see a post and I want to see more posts like that in that community, I updoot. If I want to see less posts like that in that community, I downvote. Nothing more complicated than that.
So if you post a cute cat pic to a community about cats or cute things, I’m updooting it. Not even super concerned with how well I looked that specific pic, I want to see cute cat pics there and you provided one so you get the updoot.
But if I’m in a discussion-based community and you post something with a clickbait title, I downvote. Doesn’t matter if you’re technically still on topic, I want to see less of that nonsense so I downvote it.