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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

@evan Is there a reason to do this when we can already follow hashtags?

@mayintoronto one reason is because your friend Evan asked you to do it as a favour.

Another reason is that when you "follow" a hashtag in Mastodon, it only filters the content that got to your server for other reasons.

There are three ways that content arrived: either you follow the author, someone else on your server follows the author, or your server is subscribed to a relay.

tags.pub lets you follow a hashtag globally, not just filter what got to your server.

@evan ah, so this would help a lot with say, @introduction for unfederated single user servers.

@mayintoronto yes!

And if you're interested in a hashtag, search for thathashtag at-symbol tags.pub in your Mastodon search UI and follow it there. It will boost all the content it finds with that tag to you.

@evan @mayintoronto This description sounds like following a tags.pub via hashtag is even more limited as it only gets tags from people who’ve opted into tags.pub.

@Chigaze @mayintoronto Yes, it's still in its early stages, but the architecture is made so it can handle more and more content over time. The system is opt-in for individuals, but servers and whole platforms can opt in, also.

@evan @_followback It worked perfect. My obscure hashtag showed up @cogdogcooltech

@cogdog awesome!

@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.

@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.

@evan @cogdog this isn't mastodon specific tho, it would need to be "patched" in every codebase that supports sharing so the boost number would still be correct otherwise every piece of software that shows interaction numbers will inflate them for posts that are interacted with by Tags.pub

@liaizon @cogdog They are the correct numbers, though. tags.pub does real boosts.

@evan @cogdog @julian technicality yes, but for socially no. the number of boosts something has and the reason the number is there is for humans to see how "popular" something is. the way you are using boosts to get a more global view of hashtag usage is not what non tech humans are thinking when they read that number. and if your service gets popular enough to actually work, then a majority of posts would have numbers that are breaking the expectation of people who are reading them

@liaizon @cogdog @julian

> the number of boosts something has and the reason the number is there is for humans to see how "popular" something is.

No, it's to show how many boosts there are.

@liaizon @cogdog @julian What if the boosts count broke down by manual and automated boosts? "23 boosts (19 manual, 4 automated)", something like that?

@evan @liaizon @cogdog @julian this sounds like a good solution to me (but will wait for others to respond who have thought more about this). Perhaps we could piggyback on the "bot account" marker to identify "automated" boosts?

@evan @_followback @joe Evan: how many people do you think you need to be a big enough sample?

And maybe reach out to each big servers admin to ask them to follow?

@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?