1257
Twitter/X removing the block feature
(lemm.ee)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Firefish is another fediverse microblogging platform and it has search and quote tweets, but you can't follow hashtags in your regular timeline (you can set up a separate timeline called an antenna that regularly pulls in posts according to a list of words or hashtags you specify). It also has a tweet deck style layout you can setup and you can easily follow and be followed by mastodon users from a firefish account.
There are other alternatives as well, but this is the one I am most familiar with.