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While looking for posts with the #degoogle hastag with my mastodon account, I realized that mixed in the hastag timeline there were posts to the !degoogle@lemmy.ml community, but not containing the hastag itself in the text.
I tried to look around, but In wasn't able to find an explanation of how this is supposed to work: is it because of the name of the community that is the same of the hastag? Or is or because the hastag is "embedded" in the community itself?
Edit: for those interested, the explanation is in this comment -> https://lemmy.world/post/39083486/20606028
No, this is false as far as I can tell. I am willing to be corrected by someone more knowledgeable but my understanding is:
Communities are implemented not as hashtags, but as special users who "boost" everything addressed to them. That is why Lemmy sometimes gets posts made on Mastodon that mention a Lemmy community. It doesn't always look great: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/45785836
So communities and hashtags aren't the same thing. In particular, communities have moderators who can remove things or ban people. Hashtags don't.
It is a feature of Lemmy that all new posts (not, AFAIK, comments) also get the community name added as a hashtag. This is what OP was seeing and serves to somewhat increase the reach of Lemmy posts. But you can't follow microblog hashtags on Lemmy.