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The risk of this approach is that you are not picking an interest. You are picking an environment with a set of rules and regulation, an environment that has certain physical constraints (response time, scaleability), an environment that decides which instances you can federate with.

Try explaining that with an emoji and a fun tagline.

Then they type "clubbing" or "cars" or "<insert city>" or whatever and see a shit ton of other instances they get to choose from.

This is a *BAD THING* and it's not surprising people here on HN don't see that.

A person typically have multiple interests. Associating yourself with a single interest is usually a bad idea as sooner or later your would want to talk about something else.

It would be way more natural to have interests as channels for a person's account. People could subscribe to only particular interests instead consuming the full stream of the person's posts. I'm not sure if Mastodon supports this, but it's sorely lacking in Twitter.