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.

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?

@evan @_followback @nokings why would you not just follow the hashtag?

@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.

@bipolaron

When you follow a hashtag locally on your server, it only filters content that arrived at your server due to following.

So, if someone on the Fediverse posts with a hashtag, and nobody on your server follows them, you won't see the post.

tags.pub is trying to improve that, and bring you *all* the content posted with that tag.

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

@mayintoronto yes!

@evan Done; I didn't know about this, so thanks for that.

Reading the replies, it's surprising to me that people don't really understand how tags work here. I think maybe my world view is different because I'm on a single-user instance, so it's much more obvious to me that tags don't always have a lot of reach.

@evan @mayintoronto

This gives me the heebie-jeebies. "Global" makes me uncomfortable. Automatic boosting makes me uncomfortable. Both are not particularly Fediverse-type concepts.

Here's the intro page on this (note that Social Web Foundation lists Meta and Auttomatic as partners):

Introducing tags.pub

tags.pub is a new service under development by the Social Web Foundation. It is a global hashtag server -- it lets you follow a hashtag across the Fediverse. There's lots of information on the tags.pub home page, and I (Evan) did a talk about tags.pub at FOSDEM 2026. This blog post answers some basics about…

Social Web Foundation (socialwebfoundation.org)

Sorry, Evan, but no thank you.

@evan I am so confused. I click on that account and am met with a wall of buttons(?) that say Add. There is one that reads "Accept" but I haven't knowingly clicked anything. I don't see how to simply follow. And when I click on the follow account in certain iOS apps I get nothing at all. *shrug*

@sean @evan /me goes to convert my hashtag follows to tags instead.

#tagspub

@rickscully OK. I'll change the instructions. Search for @_followback in your Mastodon server, then click the follow button there.

@jakebrake I was a tad worried about that, but I'm on a server that has threads blocked. If it's just a boost, I'm willing to try it out.

Mostly want to see if I find an uptick in harassment.

@evan

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.

@jakebrake @evan The thing I like about this specifically is that it's an opt-in global booster. So many bots currently boost without our consent.

@mayintoronto @evan

I'm wondering about down the line.

To really work, this system needs to connect to basically every Fedi server, or at least all the big ones, right? Which sounds very centralized to me. And, if it does become a popular thing, gives SWF leverage over the Fediverse: Want your posts "fully" boosted, you need to talk to SWF.

Maybe I'm missing something?

@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.

@sean Thanks so much! I appreciate it.

@evan I had questions. What is tags.pub? Why would I want it to boost my posts?

https://tags.pub explains most of it. Presumably someone has to pay for this. Is it just altruism?