I've never used Twitter. How do I join an existing conversation?

Hastags (#) are things anyone can do in any tweet. It’s a way of sort of organizing things, much like the topics you choose for Fluther questions. So you just register, and then write whatever you want to. So you can do it at the end (ie Social programs get cut while we have military stationed in 150 countries #FuckYouWashington) or at the begining (ie #FuckYouWashington for giving tax breaks to the rich while expecting the rest us to work harder for less). You can actually do it anywhere in the tweet, those just tend to make the most sense.
So, type in whatever you’d like. Or, you can search “fuckyouwashington” (which, I’m being told, has turned into #FYW to conserve space and beat Twitter censors) and just copy someone else’s by “retweeting” them. There should be a button you can click to “retweet” that will do it for you, but manually, you simply type RT @username and then the tweet. So for example, if I tweet “I think my main accomplishment in life so far is my ability to procrastinate.” then you would retweet that as “RT @Aethelflaed I think my main accomplishment in life so far is my ability to procrastinate”.
This isn’t really a conversation – it’s more a thousand voices screaming out on the same topic. Think of it more as an unorganized rally than a discussion. And by far most Twitter users do it on their computer or on apps on their smartphones, not via text.

I find discussions on Twitter hard to follow at the best of times, even having had a twitter account for years. If you want to have a twitter conversation with a particular person it’s far easier to do it with private messages to that one person. Like you can do here.

The main problem with Twitter is that conversations are not threaded, so what you frequently see on your feed is other people’s responses to THEIR friends, so you often see half of a two way conversation between your friend and a stranger whose replies you can’t see. Also if you reply to one of your friend, and they don’t log in for a while, they can easily miss your response, buried way back in their feed.

My favourite alternative is Plurk, which keeps conversations all threaded in one place and makes it easy to find new responses however old they are. But Plurk is a small community and there’s not much serious conversation going on there.

Ok, I just want to say this so my response doesn’t seem so political: The question originally asked about the #fuckyouwashington hashtag, though that’s since been removed.

@Aethelflaed , they made me change the question, and in this case I didn’t have a major problem with their suggestion.