I'm looking for a federated social media platform that allows for easy topic-based following and blocking, similar to how you can follow or block hashtags on Twitter. On Lemmy, you can follow communities, but there are so many that it becomes overwhelming. I want a platform where I can see or block everything related to a specific tag, and also view only the most popular posts about that topic, similar to how Lemmy communities work. Mastodon, for example, only shows the latest posts, which isn't ideal for trending content. I don't want a chat-like experience; I want to quickly see what's trending about a topic or what's trending in general, while being able to block a few specific topics. Ideally, I wouldn't have to spend hours curating a list of communities or followed users. Does anyone know of a platform that fits these criteria?

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[–] Tehdastehdas@piefed.social 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Not Fediverse, but an example of what works:

Quora used to have a fantastic crowd-edited question topic ontology/taxonomy for precise feed shaping with thousands of disambiguated topics interlinked in a graph/tree structure, but they enshittified the system away 2023, and now it's all LLM misunderstandings of what the question topics should be. The bot thinks a question is about apples when the question is a mathematics word puzzle; "How many apples...". The excuse for AI tagging was "tags can be abused" when in reality the crowd corrected the abuses quickly and reported the offenders. With the new AI tagger, my feed turned into viral trash from Quora-celebrities, mostly about current news.

They never made the obviously needed features of:

being able to topic tag answers, not just questions (for when the question is general and the answer is specific, like "What do you think everyone needs to know in 2025?").
the ability to follow a topic from a user, because most people write about many topics, so a follow-a-user brings uninteresting topics to my feed, but not all people write well about that topic I want to follow, so I'd need to follow that topic from good writers only.