Follow hashtags is the way to go. Mastodon should prompt new users to follow hashtags by recommending some topics for the user to choose from. EVERY social media has one of these now.
The number 1 pain in Mastodon is the dev team. I mean come on, there are plenty PRs to make mastodon better usable and they just get rejected.
Also we could have some sort of algorithm like we have here in lemmy (hot/scaled/new) but if you talk about it there you are instantly the devil. They WANT mastodon to be different, even if this hurt the userbase.
Follow hashtags is the way to go. Mastodon should prompt new users to follow hashtags by recommending some topics for the user to choose from. EVERY social media has one of these now.