@evan @_followback

Hey Evan.

Done! I posted a photo after following, and used two hashtags. Less than a minute later, I got notifications that it had been boosted, once per hashtag. Each boost was from an account corresponding to one hashtag I'd used.

That seems like the expected behaviour, but I figured I'd let you know what it did in case something seems amiss.

Cheers!

@ihember thank you so much! I'm glad it worked.

@mayintoronto The way tags.pub does boosts, we don't share any of your content with servers that you have blocked. So, hopefully, you shouldn't see an uptick in harassment.

@andyc @sean Wow, cool!

@evan Honestly, the past decade of social media and, well, everything, has made me very suspicious. The home page explains a lot but the link to the Foundation is very far down at the bottom of the page and without actually clicking it tells me nothing.

@mayintoronto
People on sites running other systems generally can't.
@evan

@evan
But Evan, don't you see? If *someone* on the Fediverse doesn't like it, it shouldn't exist!

That's why Mastodon was wiped out years ago by Diaspora users.
@jakebrake @mayintoronto

@evan Oh nice! @janboehm has a yearly live-streamed event with his podcast @festundflauschig . They once used the comments of one post as the feedback channel as hashtags didn't work. Using this technique, they could make it work.

@mayintoronto @evan @introduction and this could give me access to more people in my profession (I find few, right now, using the hashtag #lifecoach)

@evan@cosocial.ca I followed but didn't get an accept or follow back, so I think there's something up on my end! The relay follow also didn't work so I'll need to take a closer look this week

@julian OK. I use a separate key ID and actor ID for HTTP Signature, so that can throw off some implementations.

@edwiebe So, what you're looking for is more information about SWF, earlier in the page? I can do that. I added an issue here: https://github.com/social-web-foundation/tags.pub/issues/15

@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.

@jakebrake @mayintoronto I totally get the concern about centralisation. I think there are two mitigations for that issue.

The first is that there are two other services that do something similar already: https://relay.fedi.buzz/ and tagpush.

The other is that the tags.pub software is Free and Open Source software; anyone can set up their own server using the software. If you decide to do that (I hope you do!), please let me know, and we can figure out how to share public data.

@evan @mayintoronto

Thanks Evan for listening to my concerns and for your thoughtful replies!

One of the really neat things about the Fediverse is that us in the peanut gallery can reach out to folks like you who are building and improving the "plumbing" of the place, and vote with our posts. It is a special thing, and I try not to squander it by overuse or by being snarky or rude, mostly.

TBH, I do like Fedi how it is, semi-useful search and not-quite-boosts and all. So, yeah.

@evan is it normal than even from a mastodon account there is no followback ?

@evan Yes, it’s difficult for a naive mastodon user to understand this. At first it looked like the kind of scam one seems in the spam folder, SEO, buy likes, kind of stuff. I immediately wondered. I did notice your instance name and recognized it as a very unlikely source of spam. Most of the info on the about page is helpful but still I think doesn’t provide what naive users need to understand what this is about. Obviously, I hope, these are my opinions.

@rmdes no, it should follow you back. This account?

@evan @edwiebe I think it needs to explain how hashtags work in Mastodon and what this adds, because I don't think most people know that

@ghosttie @edwiebe great, thanks.

Explain why this is needed · Issue #16 · social-web-foundation/tags.pub

Explain why this is different than following a hashtag in Mastodon.

GitHub (github.com)