It’s not just lemmy that’s benefiting from Elon Musk.
Those are actually not groups. Groups boost posts from all users that mention them. https://a.gup.pe/ is one implementation of groups with mastodon in mind, but lemmy communities actually work the same way when followed from mastodon. I believe other fediverse platforms implement groups in similar ways under the hood. This means that everything is more or less interoperable between platforms.
Tusky is a great app. But it doesn’t seem to have a trending tab, which I use to find cool accounts to follow. For now I use trunks.
Not not trending hashtags. Just overall trending posts. Maybe I need to uninstall and reinstall tusky or something.
This is how I mainly used Mastodon before Lemmy. It lets you follow topics instead of people; I prefer finding content this way. Unless a person really likes the format of Mastodon better, I’d suggest Lemmy over Mastodon for people that would rather follow topics than individuals.
I found it very refreshing that it doesn’t have an algorithm at all. I know there are some downsides to that, but I think they’re worth it.