Hashtags do not replace groups.
No one moderates them. They’re easy to hijack and spam. And there’s simply no permanence to them.
Which is why, if you actually want to discuss something, it’s better to tag a group. For example, if you want to be part of an actual PC gaming community on the Fediverse, it’s better to tag @[email protected] than #pcgaming.
This needs to be common knowledge because people new to the Fediverse do not know about groups. Hell, I’d say people who have had Mastodon accounts for years still don’t know. And that’s a shame.
So if there’s 50,000 users in a conversation and they all keep “tagging” the community instead of a hashtag, then that community would have thousands of new posts?
Yes
Yikes
Why yikes? The scenario you described is literally the same as 50,000 users signing up to Lemmy to post in a Lemmy Community.
In that scenario there would be one post with everyone commenting on it. What I think we’re saying here is that it would create a new post every time a mastodon user would “join t conversation” by tagging the community.
Oh right. No, it doesn’t work that way in my experience. I’ve seen Mastodon users post to Lemmy Communities by @ mentioning them, and Mastodon users replying to posts. It often looks weird because replies have an @ mention (or multiple, in the case of replies to replies), but everything shows up in Lemmy how you’d want it to.