While Mastodon is not Twitter, and some people are wondering about how things like #eqnz would work in a civil emergency, I'd like to remind people if you use the Mastodon website you can _follow_ a hashtag.
Most of the apps* don't yet support following hashtags, but they will put the posts to that hashtag to your feed.
*especially the official app
@aethylred With the important caveat, though, that that will only show the posts with that hashtag that your server knows about, which likely isn't *all* posts across the entire fediverse.
@joepie91 If an instance isn't in the Fediverse, there will be a reason. Either the instance chose not to be in the Fediverse, or the Fediverse chose not to have it.
In the latter case, given the usual reasons for defederation, I'm not sure how helpful a defederated instance would be in a civil emergency.
@aethylred No no, that's not quite what I mean. Defederated instances are not included, of course, but those aren't the ones I'm talking about.
For any fedi instance, the view that it has of the broader network (as in, the fediverse) is going to be defined by who people on that instance are following.
So it's possible for instance A to have no connection to instance B even though it would be *allowed* to, simply because nobody on A is following B. And accordingly, A won't know about posts on B, hashtagged or otherwise.
Because of this, there isn't really one singular "the fediverse" - it's more a bunch of loose associations where every instance has a different view of "the network", even before defederation gets involved!
This is largely a feature rather than a bug (it's a big part of how the community-building aspect functions), but it makes fedi much less suitable as a 'broadcasting system', and could pose issues when trying to use it as such.
@aethylred Fair. I guess that if enough people genuinely consider it important, it would spread by boosts anyway.
@joepie91 yeah, I think you have a good point. The hashtag follow is a good start, my reckons are that given the critical mass of a large scale event propagation speed will pick up _remarkably_
I hope we see it demonstrated in something benign first to be sure.