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@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.

I think if there's one thing I'd say to #ActivityPub developers, it's this: it seems like it's going to be easier to just parse Activity Streams 2.0 data as plain JSON, but it's not. You have to keep track of too many variations. Use a JSON-LD library instead. For JavaScript, try activitystrea.ms:

https://github.com/jasnell/activitystrea.ms

@trwnh "more actively maintained"?

The code is long-term but it was built by one author of AS2 and maintained by the other. It works well, and I use it in production systems all the time.

I'm pretty sure @hongminhee has made a similar package, although I'm not sure it's distributed independently.

@evan@cosocial.ca @trwnh@mastodon.social I’m maintaining the @fedify/vocab package which depends on the jsonld package from Digital Bazaar. It’s written in 100% TypeScript, and has worked well on production services!

@brooke oh, great. Let me know if you ever need any favours. I also won't be in a rush.

@dineinfr thanks, I'll check!

@julian OK, I'll take a look!

@julian awesome!

@brooke of course. And you're someone sophisticated enough to actually look at the code and see that it ignores non-public posts, but not everyone can do that.

Since you have your own instance, you could also use the relay interface. It only sends public posts. https://tags.pub/#connect has the details.

@julian @liaizon @cogdog I can't remember if Mastodon supports multi-typed actors. [Group, Service] would be reasonable!

@julian @liaizon @cogdog ok, I opened a ticket for this.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/38494

@sandwich on some servers, like mastodon.world, it's enabled by default. You can opt out by adding hashtag NoTagsPub to your bio.

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 follow @_followback . 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.

If you're interested in any topics, like @nokings , follow that account to get posts with that hashtag from across the Fediverse.

Let me know how it works for you!

#tagspub #hashtags #activitypub

@tchambers @joe great idea!

I think it's a really interesting question of how much of the Fediverse needs to be providing data to tags.pub.

I think this might be an interesting network science problem. I'll do some math and let you know!

@evan I read years ago that multi-word tags should be done in CamelCase, for the benefit of screenreaders. So when I take my posts, I'm careful to do so. It appears however that tags.pub lowercases all my tags.

I understand that it shouldn't create separate accounts for tags that vary only by capitalisation, but when creating a new account, why not preserve the capitalisation of the original tag?