@daeyoung @strawd Mastodon is heavily hashtag-driven, there's no plain text search (and there's a historical reason for that).
So, if someone's talking about a fire in colorado, they might want to hashtag colorado at least if they want to be discovered by others.

On top, we have public feeds where anyone can see their posts (unless it's marked as unlisted).

@daeyoung the search bar doesn't do the same thing if I understand correctly. It only searches by hashtag. Perhaps that will drive people to use more hashtags - I suppose it did for me on this very question. Agreed that Elon is doing his darndest to drive folks over here. We'll have to wait and see if it becomes ubiquitous.