Well, the happiest medium I can figure out for crossposting from micro.blog to Mastodon while still squeezing hashtags in without a lot of aesthetic mess seems to be using the <pre> tag in Markdown to enclose the hashtags.
If I put them at the bottom of the post, under the photos, they don’t stick out and just look sorta like a little line of metadata. At the same time, Mastodon can pick them up as linkable hashtags.
The other thing that can work is just putting two spaces in front of a line of hashtags. The Markdown parser doesn’t pick up the leading # as a head tag. I prefer the pre approach because it conveys a sort of “this isn’t content” look when posted to a blog.
As I sit here staring at this, it makes me wonder how easy it would be to write a useful-only-to-me Hugo plugin that just turns a pre-encased line of hashtags into links to … somewhere?
When I log out of social.lol and search for hashtags, I can see the results:
https://social.lol/tags/photography
… so it wouldn’t be a dead end. Wonder what happens to that when the Mastodon renderer picks it up.
Update: Seems to render fine.