Two great things you can do to make the fediverse more diverse and interesting:
1) USE LOTS OF HASHTAGS. It's not spammy! It helps people find stuff they're interested in, since the search is intentionally limited to tags to prevent abuse.
2) BOOST THE GOOD STUFF. It gets it into new federated timelines, which is vital for smaller instances with fewer connections. It also helps with hashtag searches, since they only bring up toots known to your instance via follows and boosts.
@tw @cassolotl Is it really that much work to add one symbol to a topical keyword?
@tw I'm afraid Gargron has decided *very firmly* that it's not going to happen. :/
@feld Nope, that is not a thing on vanilla Mastodon.
@feld (Looks like you're on a Pleroma instance, maybe it's different there?)
@lain
@feld It was a deliberate choice by the lead developer, with the intent to reduce abuse. I don't think it's going to change any time soon, since it's all working as intended.
@feld You could respect that people have made choices that they're happy with based on their own priorities that happen to be different to yours?
@feld @cassolotl hashtag search can only search what your instance has seen too though, unless there's some other piece of the federation that somehow blasts all hashtags everywhere, or a central component?
If I toot "the grass is always greener" and you see it but later decide you want to find it again you will not see this toot in a search for the word "greener" because you did not fave or boost it.
This is stupid.
@cassolotl This is good advice. My tip here, though, is to maybe limit yourself to five tags per post. Not as a hard rule or anything, but as something to think about when making a post.
I say that because I've seen people really misuse this feature on #Diaspora (which also has no character limit), and it can result in tag timelines that are pretty much unparseable.
@deadsuperhero Oh I opened this recently, that I think addresses that a bit! https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/7250
@cassolotl Somehow I got it in my head that hashtags should be used sparingly here. Partly, I think it's because I often end up picking tags that no one else is using, so when I go back all I see are my own posts, so I feel like I've been spamming.
Unlike, say, Instagram, where I'll put 5-10 tags on each post, or Flickr, where I'll tag everything I can think of because tags are entirely separate fields & it just feels like I'm categorizing.
@KelsonV Hashtags are weird around here, because of the whole federation thing! So like, from your instance's point of view you might be the only person in a hashtag. But from mastodon.social's perspective you might be one of many, because people on that instance are following more people.
Sometimes I peruse my favourite hashtags at mastodon.social, like https://mastodon.social/tags/goodnews, so that I can boost stuff onto my own instance.
@cassolotl Hmm, that's something I hadn't thought of. It makes sense - I'll have to give that a try.
@cassolotl I thought boosts don't appear in federated and local timelines, only in home timelines of your followers?
@luka They appear in federated timelines, but not local timelines. :)
@cassolotl are you 100% sure? i must be missing something. :(
because i checked on 4 mastodon instances where i have accounts and none of the federated timelines have any boosts.
boosts are shown in Home timeline, lists and notifications. but not on local or federated timelines.
@luka They wouldn't *look* like boosts, they don't have that whole double-avatar thing going on in the federated timeline. They just appear as if someone on your instance was following them.
@luka Sometimes I find a toot from another instance (like from their public timeline on /about or a hashtag page), and I'm like hey that's good. So I copy the toot's URL, go back to my web UI where I've got the federated timeline open, paste the toot URL into the search box, press enter - and it's now known to my instance, so it appears in the federated timeline right at the top.
@luka Every recent, public, original (non-reply) toot that becomes known to your instance makes it into the federated timeline - and that includes toots that are boosted or entered into the search box.
Hold on I think I have a diagram that might help...
@cassolotl very nice diagram... do you have more of them? are they yours? can i use them in a mastodon presentation (will credit of course!)?
@luka I made it, but it was based on someone else's who deleted their account! You're very welcome to use it. Let me see if I have anything else that might be helpful...
This is the toot where I keep all the stuff that people often ask about: https://dev.glitch.social/@cassolotl/99897519634515247 It's pinned on my profile. :)
(this toot showed up in my federate TL)
@lanodan Yeah, Luka and I are on Mastodon and talking about Mastodon.
@lanodan That's why I said that me and Luka are both on Mastodon - it's not really relevant. You're talking like it's some grave injustice that the diagram doesn't say "on non-Mastodon instances things are different" - I made the diagram for helping people new to Mastodon, it's not helpful to add complication by referring to other softwares.
@lanodan I get that you are just trying to help but you have interrupted a conversation between two Mastodon people uninvited to say "but Pleroma!" and it's just not really relevant or helpful.
I just want to avoid yet another shitstorm between pleroma and mastodon because of differences in the implementation.
I just wanted to add a note and you look like to escalate stuff nowβ¦
And if you feel like the fediverse is only mastodon, sorry but I just hate this idea so much that there is no words.
@lanodan No way, I love that the fediverse is diverse and full of different kinds of software! I'm just saying that my diagram is made for explaining Mastodon to Mastodon newbies, and I'm trying to explain that you are being rude, and why.
@lanodan Like, we could go on to say that Pleroma doesn't call it federated timeline or local timeline, but that is also irrelevant and unhelpful.
Anyway sorry for the rudeness. I care for the software I'm taking part of, the fediverse as a network and for their users as I almost see it daily that people are being lost and often angry because fediverse is mostly being described through how mastodon is doing stuff.
@lanodan Well, I'm sorry to hear that. Maybe instead of interrupting others' conversations you could make a Pleroma-inclusive resource and share it among Pleroma users?
But the thing is that I'm far from being an designer and being good at explaining stuff for a lot of people at once, and so I would rather appreciate if people currently doing explanations would either:
- be explicit on the limitation of their current explanations and say if may work differently elsewhere/on other software/β¦
- try to be inclusive / do a general stuff (btw we have the people writing ActivityPub in the fediverse and instances developers for the questions) or at least be welcoming comments
@cassolotl ah that explains it!!!
@luka Awesome, I can totally understand how that would have thrown you! :)
@luka @cassolotl boosts aren't identified as such in the federated timeline because it doesn't care how the posts get there, unlike the home timeline
I WILL FLOG YOU.
This:
is spoken aloud as
dragon
or as
this post is tagged dragon.
Please don't make me flog you again
@cassolotl hashtagging is a lot of work. Sure would be nice to have full-text search to not need it...