@aj @mayintoronto @jakebrake @_elena @elena Oh, I'm so glad to hear that!
@julian @evan @njvack @dgfitch @skinnylatte @tankgrrl @Viss @ai6yr @mayintoronto
Wow that is just brilliant. I love how the SFO *airport museum* staff just went off and figured out how to track items (and planes visiting the airport!) and everything in a low-cost scalable way that totally plugs into the Fediverse. Neat! :fediverse:
@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.
@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.