You think being inevitably forced to see every bit of harassment and spam is going to make that platform more popular and financially viable? Nah, if anything this is free advertising for Mastodon.
Firefish is another fediverse microblogging platform and it has search and quote tweets, but you can't follow hashtags in your regular timeline (you can set up a separate timeline called an antenna that regularly pulls in posts according to a list of words or hashtags you specify). It also has a tweet deck style layout you can setup and you can easily follow and be followed by mastodon users from a firefish account.
There are other alternatives as well, but this is the one I am most familiar with.
In the same way lemmy is like many reddits communicating with eachother; mastodon is comparable to many twitters that can share users and posts with eachother
It's very similar to Twitter, I'd say even more than Lemmy is to Reddit. Mastodon federated like Lemmy but in practice you can follow anyone from any instance. You just need to follow people using @username@instance.tld rather than just @username
Yeah, but every time these stories blow up, Mastodon, Threads, and BlueSky gets another user base boost. I’m ok with that. These stories keep making the alternative communities more and more viable.
I agree, he seems unwell and the attention is continuing the negative spiral. Unfortunately, I don't think we can control what people are interested in. This is a total spectacle and media circus