@ufal

@evan @jakebrake @mayintoronto Yet every single time I use a hashtag I get a notification for each hashtag. Your system is obviously creating accounts for each hashtag.

I honestly don't understand why you think this is necessary when one of the benefits of mastodon over other systems is that you can easily follow hashtags. You are attempting to solve a problem that does not exist. (1/2)

Personally, I'd like to see you folks deal with hashtag abuse, when people use 10 or more hashtags in a post to spam as many people as possible. I cannot count the number of times I've seen posts totally unrelated to one of the hashtags I follow. That's a problem. How about solving that? (2/2)
@evan @jakebrake @mayintoronto

@mlanger @jakebrake @mayintoronto I agree about the notifications. Right now, you either have to block the tags.pub server or turn off all boost notifications. I think we'll need to get a change made to Mastodon to let you hide boost notifications from a single server.

We do have one hashtag actor per hashtag, which lets people follow a specific hashtag. It's very lightweight, though.

@mlanger @jakebrake @mayintoronto thanks, I'll add that to our list of things to work on!

@evan @jakebrake @mayintoronto Maybe this needs to be fixed? Find some sort of way to "call" hashtags without actually boosting them? Creating accounts. Because #NotEveryoneUsesHashtagsTheSameWay

@evan @jakebrake @mayintoronto Also, what you say is true, following hashtags does not do what everyone says it does. I was led to believe that following a hashtag would show all of the posts containing that hashtag, regardless of whether other people on my instance followed the account posting it. It seems to me that the current set up puts small instances at a disadvantage.

@evan @jakebrake @mayintoronto Perhaps the real solution to the hashtag problem — because yes, now I can see an actual problem that needs to be solved — is to automatically put all tagged posts on a central server for a day or two and then have all mastodon instances call that server once a day or more for hashtags that its users are following.

@evan @mayintoronto I didn't mean server side blocks but user side blocks. I have blocked domains that mastodon.art has not. The boost cannot be checked against that.

@AzureKingfisher @mayintoronto When you block a domain, that information is stored in your server. Your server prevents requests by that domain for your content.

tags.pub doesn't check your blocks information; it just shares very minimal info to subscribers, and they can't get the full information if they are blocked.

If you'd like a demo, I can record a screencast for you, or you can test it yourself.

@evan @_followback

is there a detailed explainer on tags here and maybe search on the fedi too? it's the one argument I think the other place can make but I'm sure we can be better at it too.

@wjmaggos I'm not sure of your question. You mean, is there a document about how hashtags work on the Fediverse? And a similar document about how user and content search works on the Fediverse?

@evan

sorry, yes. what holds back our search functionality and what could be done (I didn't know lots of tagged posts don't come up when you click on them).

I love my experience except for the people that are not here, but I follow a lot of people (esp news outlets via the flipboard server).

@evan But here is a concern or maybe I am missing something. Every time I use a hashtag I get a boost notification from its account on tags.pub. This is excessive noise. It puts a burden on having to put a mute on each account?

@cogdog @evan yeah this makes Tags.pub totally not usable in its current form. I was gonna report about this situation too after enabling it for a few days. Now my boost count is completely off too so if I make a post that ends in 5 hashtags it makes it look like this is a more popular post then one that has 0 hashtags.

@julian I commented on the ticket! Looks like we can both make some changes to make this more robust. I'm going to push and test today.

@evan This looks really useful to me as I've been trying to move my primary account on a big server to this single-user instance running #gotosocial. The only sticking point until now is that I rely on hashtags to find new content and my server, although fairly well federated (5k other servers), just doesn't see nearly any hashtag activity.

However, I can't find the followback account from my server. Nothing is returned by search in either the Phanpy or Elk interfaces. Nor can I find any of the hashtags accounts. Do you think this an issue with gotosocial, or my server specifically?

@bill That's a great question. I haven't tested with gotosocial. I'll give it a try and let you know.

@bill I opened an issue here:

https://github.com/social-web-foundation/tags.pub/issues/18

@liaizon @cogdog I've got an issue open for this.

https://github.com/social-web-foundation/tags.pub/issues/13

Right now, I think the only thing we can do is submit a patch to Mastodon to let you ignore boost notifications from a particular account or domain.