It seems anytime I try to check out Mastodon it is always some negative political view or affiliation of why X, Y & Z is bad. Is this just what most people like boosting or is it a sign of botting to push negativity over the more positive headlines?
I do understand I can switch to any Mastodon instance I want and stick to a small community, however I like keeping up with trending topics in the world. Maybe the most popular accounts in the Mastodon community likes to rise up pitchforks every minute.
How do you follow hashtags?
In the default Mastodon web UI you can simply click on a hashtag and then press the "Follow hashtag" button. If you want to follow a hashtag that's not showing up in your feed yet then you can search for it and then click on it in the search results. If you don't see the "follow hashtag" button that might mean that your instance is running a very old version of Mastodon. Hashtag follows were added in version 4.0 which came out at the end of last year.
One caveat is that hashtags follows only show posts that "make it" to your instance either because they were created locally or because another user on your instances followed the person who posted them. In practice being on an instance with a sizable user base or an instance that's oriented towards your interests should work well.
It's currently not possible on the official Android app (unsure about iOS) but you can do so on the website and third party apps. I'm using Tusky on Android as it reminiscent of one of my favorite dead apps Flamingo for Twitter.