@AzureKingfisher @mayintoronto we can't and we don't want to.

tags.pub does not share the full content of your post; just a link. When a subscriber to a tags.pub account receives the boost, it has to go fetch the content from your server.

When it asks for the content from your server, your server checks against your blocklist. If the subscriber is blocked, your server won't return the post.

I hope that explains it!

@cogdog awesome!

@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.

@ufal the followback account? I've had a couple of notes on that. Can you add more info here?

Misskey follow doesn't work · Issue #9 · social-web-foundation/tags.pub

hi Evan, sorry for tagging you publicly but I think others might be interested in this. Tags.pub is a great idea, but I can't follow accounts from tags.pub from Catodon/Sharkey (and I guess Misskey too, since they are forks of that). The...

GitHub (github.com)

@ufal

Personally, I'd like to see you folks deal with hashtag abuse, when people use 10 or more hashtags in a post to spam as many people as possible. I cannot count the number of times I've seen posts totally unrelated to one of the hashtags I follow. That's a problem. How about solving that? (2/2)
@evan @jakebrake @mayintoronto

@evan @jakebrake @mayintoronto Yet every single time I use a hashtag I get a notification for each hashtag. Your system is obviously creating accounts for each hashtag.

I honestly don't understand why you think this is necessary when one of the benefits of mastodon over other systems is that you can easily follow hashtags. You are attempting to solve a problem that does not exist. (1/2)

@mlanger @jakebrake @mayintoronto

> 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 I agree about the notifications. Right now, you either have to block the tags.pub server or turn off all boost notifications. I think we'll need to get a change made to Mastodon to let you hide boost notifications from a single server.

We do have one hashtag actor per hashtag, which lets people follow a specific hashtag. It's very lightweight, though.

@mlanger @jakebrake @mayintoronto thanks, I'll add that to our list of things to work on!

@evan @jakebrake @mayintoronto Maybe this needs to be fixed? Find some sort of way to "call" hashtags without actually boosting them? Creating accounts. Because #NotEveryoneUsesHashtagsTheSameWay

@evan @jakebrake @mayintoronto Also, what you say is true, following hashtags does not do what everyone says it does. I was led to believe that following a hashtag would show all of the posts containing that hashtag, regardless of whether other people on my instance followed the account posting it. It seems to me that the current set up puts small instances at a disadvantage.

@evan @jakebrake @mayintoronto Perhaps the real solution to the hashtag problem — because yes, now I can see an actual problem that needs to be solved — is to automatically put all tagged posts on a central server for a day or two and then have all mastodon instances call that server once a day or more for hashtags that its users are following.

@evan @mayintoronto I didn't mean server side blocks but user side blocks. I have blocked domains that mastodon.art has not. The boost cannot be checked against that.

@AzureKingfisher @mayintoronto When you block a domain, that information is stored in your server. Your server prevents requests by that domain for your content.

tags.pub doesn't check your blocks information; it just shares very minimal info to subscribers, and they can't get the full information if they are blocked.

If you'd like a demo, I can record a screencast for you, or you can test it yourself.

@evan @_followback

is there a detailed explainer on tags here and maybe search on the fedi too? it's the one argument I think the other place can make but I'm sure we can be better at it too.

@wjmaggos I'm not sure of your question. You mean, is there a document about how hashtags work on the Fediverse? And a similar document about how user and content search works on the Fediverse?

@evan

sorry, yes. what holds back our search functionality and what could be done (I didn't know lots of tagged posts don't come up when you click on them).

I love my experience except for the people that are not here, but I follow a lot of people (esp news outlets via the flipboard server).