Yes the hashtag follow feature existed before the v4 implementation.
Also FYI I feel a lot of the qoto features are much easier to handle via mobile apps (tested only on #Tusky).
Yea we had follow hashtags festure years before mainline mastodon. We also have a ton of other features they dont have.
@monotrox99 Agreed. I suspect qoto is running a modded fork of mastodon v3.2.1. So our hashtag subscription feature may have been implemented independently from the one that was introduced in v4 on other instances.
Maybe "following hashtags from search results" would be worth a feature request with our admin @freemo ? :)