This all brings in a firehose, which can be a lot of data to handle, especially if you're only interested in a few topics.
Fedibuzz has solved this really nicely, by having one relay per hashtag. So an admin can add a few hashtag relays for topics of interest to their users.
@julian We apparently agree that expecting us to follow bot accounts to see hashtags is absurd. But that's how it looks to me.
Are you saying that this is under the hood stuff and we are not expected to follow bot accounts? That somehow these accounts will transparently deliver the hashtags we follow? If so, it's a huge mistake to notify users that an instantly created bot account has boosted a post.
And again, I think the bigger problem is hashtag abuse. I hope someone is working on that.
@julian @mlanger I don't actually think it's an ugly hack.
In ActivityPub world, things that you follow remotely are actors. They can be people, groups, organizations, bots, even other things like documents or places.
For following a hashtag remotely, I think it should look like any other actor on the network.
@giantspecks @mlanger @jakebrake @mayintoronto Hi John! I agree, you should be able to follow hashtags globally across the Fediverse. That's why we're making tags.pub.
@mlanger @jakebrake @mayintoronto
You can definitely opt out of tags.pub! Nobody has to use it if they don't want to.
You can follow hashtags in Mastodon; many other servers on the Fediverse don't have that feature.
When you follow a hashtag in Mastodon, it only shows you content from people you follow, or from people who others on your instance follow. If someone posts on the Fediverse using a hashtag and nobody on your instance follows them, you won't see it.
@mlanger @jakebrake @mayintoronto you're right that there are very few followers for the hashtag accounts on tags.pub. We are just getting this service started.
We're actually pretty careful with bandwidth.
I am one of the authors of ActivityPub, and I wrote a programmer's guide for O'Reilly Media about the protocol. I try to use it as carefully as I can.
If nobody's following a hashtag account, no data gets delivered.