@andyc @sean Wow, cool!

@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.

@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

@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.

@mayintoronto @evan @introduction and this could give me access to more people in my profession (I find few, right now, using the hashtag #lifecoach)

@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.

@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.

@evan @mayintoronto

Thanks Evan for listening to my concerns and for your thoughtful replies!

One of the really neat things about the Fediverse is that us in the peanut gallery can reach out to folks like you who are building and improving the "plumbing" of the place, and vote with our posts. It is a special thing, and I try not to squander it by overuse or by being snarky or rude, mostly.

TBH, I do like Fedi how it is, semi-useful search and not-quite-boosts and all. So, yeah.

@evan is it normal than even from a mastodon account there is no followback ?

@evan Yes, it’s difficult for a naive mastodon user to understand this. At first it looked like the kind of scam one seems in the spam folder, SEO, buy likes, kind of stuff. I immediately wondered. I did notice your instance name and recognized it as a very unlikely source of spam. Most of the info on the about page is helpful but still I think doesn’t provide what naive users need to understand what this is about. Obviously, I hope, these are my opinions.

@rmdes no, it should follow you back. This account?

@evan @edwiebe I think it needs to explain how hashtags work in Mastodon and what this adds, because I don't think most people know that

@ghosttie @edwiebe great, thanks.

https://github.com/social-web-foundation/tags.pub/issues/16

@evan Question -- now that I'm following + being followed by the bot, I get a boost notification for each post with hashtags.
That's going to get annoying pretty quickly... is the intention for me to mute the bot after I follow it? Would that work OK, or does the bot ever need to e.g. private-mention me something I need to not miss?

@evan

OK, I have followed @_followback, so now the #Hashtags I use will be more widely distributed, to anyone who follows @Hashtags rather than just distributed those instances who happen to have someone who follows me.

And I have followed @bikenite so now I should be getting more #BikeNite messages, rather than just those that happen to come to my instance for other people on this instance.

#TagsPub #FollowBack

@evan followed! will this only boost my #posts with #hashtags or will it also scoop up stuff i boost or other stuff on my server?

@aeva @evan
Based on what I recall Evan saying, it is only interested in hashtags.

@virtuous_sloth @evan I'm asking what exactly I'm #holepunching by #following that bot so that tags dot pub can scoop up those #delicious #hashtags since my server didn't seem to be picked up before via any of the means #outlined on tags.pub