Friends, if you haven't already, it would be a big favour to me if you could enable tags.pub to boost your public tagged posts.
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Friends, if you haven't already, it would be a big favour to me if you could enable tags.pub to boost your public tagged posts.
Just search for @_followback in your Mastodon UI. Click the follow button there. (Don't try to follow from the profile page; it doesn't work yet.)
It will follow you back, and when you make a post with a hashtag in it, the server will boost your post from the appropriate hashtag.
@evan I am so confused. I click on that account and am met with a wall of buttons(?) that say Add. There is one that reads "Accept" but I haven't knowingly clicked anything. I don't see how to simply follow. And when I click on the follow account in certain iOS apps I get nothing at all. *shrug*
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@evan Done; I didn't know about this, so thanks for that.
Reading the replies, it's surprising to me that people don't really understand how tags work here. I think maybe my world view is different because I'm on a single-user instance, so it's much more obvious to me that tags don't always have a lot of reach.
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@evan I am so confused. I click on that account and am met with a wall of buttons(?) that say Add. There is one that reads "Accept" but I haven't knowingly clicked anything. I don't see how to simply follow. And when I click on the follow account in certain iOS apps I get nothing at all. *shrug*
@rickscully OK. I'll change the instructions. Search for @_followback in your Mastodon server, then click the follow button there.
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Friends, if you haven't already, it would be a big favour to me if you could enable tags.pub to boost your public tagged posts.
Just search for @_followback in your Mastodon UI. Click the follow button there. (Don't try to follow from the profile page; it doesn't work yet.)
It will follow you back, and when you make a post with a hashtag in it, the server will boost your post from the appropriate hashtag.
And if you're interested in a hashtag, search for thathashtag at-symbol tags.pub in your Mastodon search UI and follow it there. It will boost all the content it finds with that tag to you.
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@jakebrake @evan The thing I like about this specifically is that it's an opt-in global booster. So many bots currently boost without our consent.
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I'm wondering about down the line.
To really work, this system needs to connect to basically every Fedi server, or at least all the big ones, right? Which sounds very centralized to me. And, if it does become a popular thing, gives SWF leverage over the Fediverse: Want your posts "fully" boosted, you need to talk to SWF.
Maybe I'm missing something?
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@mayintoronto one reason is because your friend Evan asked you to do it as a favour.
Another reason is that when you "follow" a hashtag in Mastodon, it only filters the content that got to your server for other reasons.
There are three ways that content arrived: either you follow the author, someone else on your server follows the author, or your server is subscribed to a relay.
tags.pub lets you follow a hashtag globally, not just filter what got to your server.
@evan @mayintoronto This description sounds like following a tags.pub via hashtag is even more limited as it only gets tags from people who’ve opted into tags.pub.
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@evan @mayintoronto This description sounds like following a tags.pub via hashtag is even more limited as it only gets tags from people who’ve opted into tags.pub.
@Chigaze @mayintoronto Yes, it's still in its early stages, but the architecture is made so it can handle more and more content over time. The system is opt-in for individuals, but servers and whole platforms can opt in, also.
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@evan Done; I didn't know about this, so thanks for that.
Reading the replies, it's surprising to me that people don't really understand how tags work here. I think maybe my world view is different because I'm on a single-user instance, so it's much more obvious to me that tags don't always have a lot of reach.
@sean Thanks so much! I appreciate it.
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Friends, if you haven't already, it would be a big favour to me if you could enable tags.pub to boost your public tagged posts.
Just search for @_followback in your Mastodon UI. Click the follow button there. (Don't try to follow from the profile page; it doesn't work yet.)
It will follow you back, and when you make a post with a hashtag in it, the server will boost your post from the appropriate hashtag.
@evan I had questions. What is tags.pub? Why would I want it to boost my posts?
https://tags.pub explains most of it. Presumably someone has to pay for this. Is it just altruism?
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Friends, if you haven't already, it would be a big favour to me if you could enable tags.pub to boost your public tagged posts.
Just search for @_followback in your Mastodon UI. Click the follow button there. (Don't try to follow from the profile page; it doesn't work yet.)
It will follow you back, and when you make a post with a hashtag in it, the server will boost your post from the appropriate hashtag.
Hey Evan.
Done! I posted a photo after following, and used two hashtags. Less than a minute later, I got notifications that it had been boosted, once per hashtag. Each boost was from an account corresponding to one hashtag I'd used.
That seems like the expected behaviour, but I figured I'd let you know what it did in case something seems amiss.
Cheers!
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@evan Honestly, the past decade of social media and, well, everything, has made me very suspicious. The home page explains a lot but the link to the Foundation is very far down at the bottom of the page and without actually clicking it tells me nothing.
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@evan Is there a reason to do this when we can already follow hashtags?
@mayintoronto
People on sites running other systems generally can't.
@evan -
@evan
But Evan, don't you see? If *someone* on the Fediverse doesn't like it, it shouldn't exist!That's why Mastodon was wiped out years ago by Diaspora users.
@jakebrake @mayintoronto -
And if you're interested in a hashtag, search for thathashtag at-symbol tags.pub in your Mastodon search UI and follow it there. It will boost all the content it finds with that tag to you.
@evan Oh nice! @janboehm has a yearly live-streamed event with his podcast @festundflauschig . They once used the comments of one post as the feedback channel as hashtags didn't work. Using this technique, they could make it work.
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@evan ah, so this would help a lot with say, @introduction for unfederated single user servers.
@mayintoronto @evan @introduction and this could give me access to more people in my profession (I find few, right now, using the hashtag #lifecoach)
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Friends, if you haven't already, it would be a big favour to me if you could enable tags.pub to boost your public tagged posts.
Just search for @_followback in your Mastodon UI. Click the follow button there. (Don't try to follow from the profile page; it doesn't work yet.)
It will follow you back, and when you make a post with a hashtag in it, the server will boost your post from the appropriate hashtag.
@evan@cosocial.ca I followed but didn't get an accept or follow back, so I think there's something up on my end! The relay follow also didn't work so I'll need to take a closer look this week
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@evan@cosocial.ca I followed but didn't get an accept or follow back, so I think there's something up on my end! The relay follow also didn't work so I'll need to take a closer look this week
@julian OK. I use a separate key ID and actor ID for HTTP Signature, so that can throw off some implementations.
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This gives me the heebie-jeebies. "Global" makes me uncomfortable. Automatic boosting makes me uncomfortable. Both are not particularly Fediverse-type concepts.
Here's the intro page on this (note that Social Web Foundation lists Meta and Auttomatic as partners):
https://socialwebfoundation.org/2026/03/17/introducing-tags-pub/
Sorry, Evan, but no thank you.
@jakebrake @mayintoronto Hey, Jake. Your concerns are justified! It's never a bad idea to look at projects carefully.
tags.pub is one of the oldest projects on the ActivityPub network. It was one of the test implementations of ActivityPub. It's been dormant for years; we've been lucky enough to get to implement this with funding from the Sovereign Tech Agency.
The service is opt-in, either by user or by server (and users can opt out if their server opted in). Nobody has to use it.
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