https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/blob/main/config/defaults.hjson#L22-L56

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1. “sort”: that’s the word for the options of “new”, “scaled”, “active” etc, right?

Yep https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html

3. @Die4Ever pointed out there’s a “Show Read Posts” option in the settings. I’ve unticked that and will see how it goes.

I honestly don’t use this feature myself lol but I hope it helps you!

In your settings on the website there’s a checkbox for “Show read posts”, uncheck that. Some apps have the same feature or similar. Some apps also have an option to mark as read when you scroll past a post without opening it.

like I said, hashtags are fun, but the fact that even if you follow the hashtag it only shows posts that were already federated into your instance confuses people

communities/groups will federate the posts for you if you follow, but following a hashtag does not give any federation

Even if you could follow hashtags on Lemmy, you would also need to be able to follow users for anything to show up (so that’s 2 big new features required). And since it requires following users, that would also mean a culture shift would be required, you’d need to convince your instance-mates to use their Lemmy accounts to follow people, but people are mostly here to follow communities not people.

I’m not against the features being added, I just don’t think they’re going to be as impactful to the Lemmy platform as expected.

yea I mean it’s fun to use and works well if you’re on a large instance like mastodon.social, I use it even on a medium size instance

but communities/groups work better on the fediverse, and maybe something in between the 2 could be created, some kind of federated version of hashtags

hashtags don’t work well on the Fediverse, a hashtag doesn’t have an owning instance which means there’s no way to push/pull the content by hashtag