As a new user, I'm enjoying Mastodon's vibe so far but the one thing that is a letdown is the trending hashtags. I've been checking them regularly over the past couple of weeks and it seems like they're pretty much always like this.
Even on days with big news stories, people on Mastodon are only talking about what day of the week it is like company employees on some internal message board?
Is there anything that can be done to liven them up a bit?
is there a specific type of content you want? you can try following 'groups' instead of hashtags
the benefit of groups over hashtags is that you see posts from profiles that have not yet federated with your specific server since the group itself boots anything that is posted to it, so you can sometimes see things that hashtags miss
here is a website explaining it a bit more:
https://a.gup.pe/
to follow a group simply put whatever you want to follow before @a.gup.pe like so:
gardening@a.gup.pe
Sounds a lot like how Lemmy communities show up on Mastodon. Maybe one day we can have the reverse as well (Mastodon groups showing up as communities)