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The only way a post can be searched for on here is through hashtags.
The hashtag search will only work if there is an exact letter-for-letter match.
If someone publishes a post with the hashtag #Watercolour, that post will NOT appear in searches for #Watercolor or #Watercolours or #Watercolors
That's why some people use hashtags that are multiple variations on a topic, because it's the only way to give a post a realistic chance of discovery on an exact-hashtag-only search system.
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The main controversy is accessibility barriers, as long lists of repetitive hashtags make life difficult for blind people who rely on screen readers to read posts out loud.
This issue can be reduced by putting all the hashtags in a list at the end of the post, with a "Hashtag list" warning before the list.
However, this still isn't perfect, and the current system of tagging has many other issues too.
I've tried to suggest a possible solution here:
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/24445
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p.s. Please don't harass artists who have relevant hashtag lists on the end of their posts. Many are low income people dependent on selling art, and need to use multiple variant tags simply to be seen at all.
Including relevant tags at the end of a post is not spamming, it's just the consequence of an exact-tag-only search system.
This isn't Twitter, there is no general search. The actual content of posts is invisible to people searching, so people have to use tags to make up for this.
p.p.s. Lower or upper case does NOT matter for discovery, #WaterColour and #Watercolour are treated exactly the same by the search system. You do NOT need to do variations for case!
However, if a tag contains multiple words you should mark the first letter of each word with upper case letters such as #DogsOfMastodon as this allows screen readers to read each word out aloud.
@feditips
If synonymous hashtags proposal were to come to life, we would probably forget about such inconvenience and it would type out almost everything in pascal case automatically, as well as goodbye to hindrance of covering all other variations of the words (plurals, identical entities).