Hashtag browsing for topic-wise content discovery

[nileshtrivedi]

Messaging apps like Slack/Discord and to some extent Telegram provide organization of threads by topics. This allows people to find posts easily and also enables discoverability of old posts.

There is a working group for "Threadiverse" - the subset of ActivityPub-enabled applications built around a topic-centric model of content representation: https://community.nodebb.org/topic/17908/threadiverse-working-group

However, my feature request is much simpler:

• Add a page where hashtags (curated by the admin of the instance) are listed along with recent posts (excluding replies) for each hashtag.
• On this page, if the user wants to post under a specific hashtag, it navigates to the compose form with the hashtag filled in.

I am currently part a couple of communities which are looking to migrate away from Slack. Mastodon with Elk as UI would be a serious contender if topic-wise browsing/discovery of older content is made easier. This seems fully compatible with ActivityPub protocol and could even be implemented without modifying the server.

[nileshtrivedi]

I noticed now that such a page does already exist: https://elk.zone/fosstodon.org/explore/tags

All that is needed is to add:

• A few recent posts under each hashtag
• A button to make a new post under a hashtag

This page is using a specific API to get trending tags. I asked this question in masto.js repo.