I think they're super useful for realtime, that's what that stuff was built for. It's been ages since I've done stuff like that and I forgot how fun it could be. Do we really not even need hashtags, though? Am I interpreting correctly that if I were to, say, make some random comment about being sick as a dog in a microblog, that might get picked up by accounts interested in dogs? If I understand that, that seems like a disastrous oversight.
the thing is that when federation works they could also go on all the federated microblogging instances and on the home of the followers. This way they could get "points" from favs and boosts and be more visible here as well.
This may be true, fair. They're also still battling every other post in the fediverse for that, so I'm not sure how helpful that's going to prove in the long run. I'd have to see how it plays out