Not using a hashtag in your toot seems almost like limiting it to your followers only. Which could be useful.
@glightly I think it also shows up in your local server feed, but yeah it seems kinda handy to have the ability to limit initial exposure of a post.
@Britt Yeah. There is no true privacy here, even for DMs, but functionally, not having hashtags does almost work like a LiveJournal privacy setting.