stpaultim, I've been experimenting with Soapbox platform (based on Pleroma) for fediverse. I have my own server using a hosted service.
On a small server, hashtags seem to be pretty useless. I hoped to create a niche account, but without the ability to search for posts or follow a hashtag it's not useful.
I could get on a much larger server or simply use a different tool.
If anyone is interested, I commented on this Soapbox issue.
https://gitlab.com/soapbox-pub/soapbox/-/issues/1192