I have not read the linked GitHub issue, just the article, but I think the author's take is not the way it should be done.
First of all, sometimes, #hashtags belong to the text. That they're links in the midst of plain text is part of what makes them valuable, just as the embedded links in the person's article.
Secondly, having tags within the text does not preclude also having tags that are attached to posts but not within them. They could point to the same resources or even have different resources. For example, embedded tags could be based on the original post's home instance and attached tags could be based on the reader's home instance. This would give two different views of the tags' contents, assuming that the poster and the reader are not using the same instance.
Finally, yes spammers and such can overuse and attempt to game tags to increase their posts' visibility. But the answer to that is for the software (Mastodon or whatever) to strictly enforce limits on the number of tags. Any time there's a tool to raise the visibility of something you post, it will be misused if possible. Long before hashtag abuse, there was meta tag abuse on web pages, when such tags were used to help decide which results to show in web pages. These days, I'm not even sure search engines still use meta tags to categorize sites and surface them in search results.
Hi @Keelan I use Friendica and it is amazing. Friendica can federate with ActivityPub and Diaspora as well, which I think is a great feature. Another thing which I like about Friendica is the ability to follow #hashtags and of course the RSS feeds.
I just implemented creation / rewriting of links in notes and opening them by #AndStatus for #mentions and for #hashtags. This greatly simplifies navigation without leaving the application, leading you through the #fediverse and time in just several clicks. I was surprised to find out that users, whith whom I talked recently, gave me their feedback years ago already... (I have history of notes for several years, from different social networks, stored on my phone in AndStatus)
@FuzboleroXV Generally, you are proposing to group #hashtags with the same meaning. These hashtags could be different forms of the same word, abbreviations, different spellings, including spellings in different languages; and even synonyms. Actions with the #HashTagGroup will be like shortcuts for each #hashtag in the group. E.g. tagging, subscribing or viewing. ?! I expect that some users would like to group hashtags differently, so these groups will be user-defined.
@gargron Either way, I don't think there would be a problem for !GNUsocial with remote #Unicode (non-ASCII) characters. Nicknames are normalised as-is (for example removal of underscores which was another discussion). I don't remember if transliteration of nicknames is done, but we do that for #håshtägs (which has also sparked controversy due to incompatibility with farsi).
My desire is to implement unicode support for nicknames. I don't know about the best strategy for homoglyph attacks etc, but I bet the !xmpp community has lots to share there. There you can have at least a large set of Unicode in your user part of the XMPP ID. Maybe #Prosody developer @zash knows more about unicode in XMPP usernames etc?