@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.

@julian I commented on the ticket! Looks like we can both make some changes to make this more robust. I'm going to push and test today.

@bill That's a great question. I haven't tested with gotosocial. I'll give it a try and let you know.

@bill I opened an issue here:

https://github.com/social-web-foundation/tags.pub/issues/18

@liaizon @cogdog I've got an issue open for this.

Turning off boost notifications · Issue #13 · social-web-foundation/tags.pub

I've had a number of complaints from people that tags.pub generates too many boost notifications for them. Each time they post with a hashtag, they will get notified of the boost. And if they have several hashtags, they get several boost...

GitHub (github.com)

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.

@liaizon@social.wake.st well, I mean, it is a boost, technically..... Mastodon and other software could technically not count announces from actors identifying themselves as service type actors maybe?

cc @evan@cosocial.ca

@julian @liaizon Oh, actually, that's a much better fix than just hiding from a particular domain.

@julian @liaizon Julian, would that work for NodeBB too? I know I get notifications when activitypub.space shares my toots.

@julian @liaizon I'm pretty sure channel.org has service actors, and it does automated 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.

@evan This seems to me like subscribing to a relay in an instance. What's the difference?

@_followback

@df

- Regular users can follow a tags.pub actor, not just admins of the server
- tags.pub only sends data tagged with that hashtag. https://relay.fedi.buzz/ does this with relays, btw!
- When you subscribe to a tags.pub hashtag, your account doesn't send any data to tags.pub. Relays are two-way. The _followback account does get all your public posts, though, it's true.

It's not crazy to think of tags.pub as a focused relay for a particular hashtag that normal users can subscribe to.

@evan This is a very interesting project. It really does give more power to regular users of the #Fediverse, not just administrators. And it apparently works well on platforms other than #Mastodon.

@df it looks like it works for you!

@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@cosocial.ca I don't think so, because when those announces happen they're from Group actors

Maybe the group actor could identify themselves at a bot? I think Mastodon has a separate flag for that........

cc @liaizon@social.wake.st @cogdog@cosocial.ca