@alice @OliviaVespera Answering this part:> I understand that single-user instances can't follow hashtags the way larger instances can. How many single-user instances—which are, by definition, one (likely more tech-savvy) user—are there?... not to take any particular position but because I happen to have the data, and it may (or may not) be useful in this conversation. * There are at least 3,748 Mastodon instances with one active user (3,734 users total on these)* There are at least 6,747 Mastodon instances with <= 10 active users (15,101 users total on these)* There are at least 7,756 Mastodon instances with <= 100 active users (49,550 users total on these)Notes:This is out of at lest 666,365 active Mastodon users on at least 8,224 instancesUser counts are self-reported from these instances via 'nodeinfo'. "active" here is the self-reported monthly active usersI say "at least" as not all Mastodon servers choose to report statistics I am only looking at Mastodon instances here because I know that Mastodon supports the feature of subscribing to hashtags and am less familiar with what other fediverse software supports. There are other complications in the data, for example, it is likely that many or most gotosocial instances are single-user or otherwise small, but gotosocial does not report user user counts by default. Most instances that report a single user are actually wordpress or ghost, but I'm not sure whether those are relevant to this conversation.Probably known to those in this conversation, but for others reading this: subscribing to hashtags works fundamentally differently than following accounts. The simplified version is: when you follow an account, that account's instance lets your instance know about posts by that account. When you subscribe to a hashtag, no such thing happens, since the hashtag does not "live" on any instance. Instead, what happens is that your instance shows you all posts with that hashtag that it has found out about for other reasons; this is most commonly because those posts were made by an account followed by someone on your instance, or were boosted by such an account. Thus, the fewer users on your instance, the lower fraction of posts with a particular hashtag you will tend to see.
