The idea with Smithereen is to basically let people who already know each other IRL communicate with each other. Without a loud TV in the background and without merchants constantly pulling them aside to sell something. That's the atmosphere of the old VKontakte.
Btw you can use a subset of HTML for text formatting. And hashtags aren't supported because there's no global search and I don't want a half-baked thing like Mastodon has.
Hi, indeed, I wasn’t sure hashtags would work, so it was worth testing. Thanks again for developing Smithereens; I’d like to help you but I’m not a developer… (I may help to translate the UI in French though, I’ll have plenty of time in the next weeks.)
Did you read this thread from @pluralistic@mamot.fr? It talks about Facebook, "natural monopolies", and switching costs: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/106291052294150351