I know what you mean about feeling reluctant to use them tho. There's also the issue of people using hashtags just for visibility eg on something like Asknostr which feels spammy but that is somewhat a failure of discovery mechanisms (almost as bad as asking people to repost notes for sats, that feels the most spammy to me).
Niche hashtags and topic hashtags can be great, although it is perhaps revealing how little there can be on certain topics (that you can find at least). Then the generic hashtags or hashtag nostr, plebchain, bitcoin seems somewhat pointless.
Bluesky does really well with their feeds, but they generally have a wider userbase and broader topics.
Michael J (nprofile…ujaz) and Silberengel (nprofile…7pmw) seem to think topic-relays are a potential way forward. I'm too clueless to follow the conversation on it tho. But posting it here as you may also be interested.
quotingThe topical relay model is a different workflow:
nevent1q…gsg0
1. You decided to write about a topic.
2. You client determines that the topic is "sourdough bread baking".
3. Your client writes the event to the "bread baking" relay and adds "sourdough" as a tag.
4. Everyone in the sourdough community forum immediately sees your event. Nobody else sees your event. The moderator (human or AI) can immediately moderate the event, as they know what a sourdough forum event should look like and they oversee the content on that relay.
5. You open your "notifications/chat/kind01" client and can see the responses from the sourdough forum in it.
6. You can respond there, only to them, but you can also allow your wider fren group to see the discussion, by broadcasting it to more relays.