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   Talon (talon@dragonscave.space)'s status on Wednesday, 13-Dec-2023 00:21:36 JST Talon

   Something I’ve been pondering. One of the biggest advice you get on the Fediverse is to use Hashtags in your posts. But hashtags don’t federate unless the posts do, so if you’re on a small or single user instance, hashtags won’t do much for you. If I search for #SomeHashtag I will get a completely different set of posts than a bigger instance like mastodon.social might. If you have a hashtag for your AMA for example, or for your show, or your research, simply using a hashtag won't help and you're much more likely to get responses from big instances. Even if someone on mastodon.social posts with #SomeHashtag, as long as nobody from the cave is following them, we won't get it. We used to use fedibuzz to kinda get around this, but that no longer works. Am I the only one who thinks this is very unfortunate and makes using hashtags to organize quite a lot less useful? How many people even know this is how it works? Do I even have it correct?

   • GreenSkyOverMe (Monika) repeated this.
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     Talon (talon@dragonscave.space)'s status on Wednesday, 13-Dec-2023 00:22:14 JST Talon

     in reply to

     I know there’s no good answer to the hashtag problem. If you’re running a very small instance, chances are you might get overwhelmed with too many posts if hashtags were federated more liberally. But on the other hand, you don’t actually know you’re missing out from a usability point of view if you search for a hashtag on your instance, especially if the instance is small. Like I don’t know about you, but to me that’s not great user experience. I bet a lot of people don’t know this happens and are confused as to why their favorite hashtags are so quiet, when they might not be.