https://www.theverge.com/23673125/mastodon-separate-tags-hashtag-navigation-accessibility [www theverge com]

I have not read the linked GitHub issue, just the article, but I think the author's take is not the way it should be done.

First of all, sometimes, #hashtags belong to the text. That they're links in the midst of plain text is part of what makes them valuable, just as the embedded links in the person's article.

Secondly, having tags within the text does not preclude also having tags that are attached to posts but not within them. They could point to the same resources or even have different resources. For example, embedded tags could be based on the original post's home instance and attached tags could be based on the reader's home instance. This would give two different views of the tags' contents, assuming that the poster and the reader are not using the same instance.

Finally, yes spammers and such can overuse and attempt to game tags to increase their posts' visibility. But the answer to that is for the software (Mastodon or whatever) to strictly enforce limits on the number of tags. Any time there's a tool to raise the visibility of something you post, it will be misused if possible. Long before hashtag abuse, there was meta tag abuse on web pages, when such tags were used to help decide which results to show in web pages. These days, I'm not even sure search engines still use meta tags to categorize sites and surface them in search results.