Friends, if you haven't already, it would be a big favour to me if you could enable tags.pub to boost your public tagged posts.
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This gives me the heebie-jeebies. "Global" makes me uncomfortable. Automatic boosting makes me uncomfortable. Both are not particularly Fediverse-type concepts.
Here's the intro page on this (note that Social Web Foundation lists Meta and Auttomatic as partners):
Introducing tags.pub
tags.pub is a new service under development by the Social Web Foundation. It is a global hashtag server -- it lets you follow a hashtag across the Fediverse. There's lots of information on the tags.pub home page, and I (Evan) did a talk about tags.pub at FOSDEM 2026. This blog post answers some basics about…
Social Web Foundation (socialwebfoundation.org)
Sorry, Evan, but no thank you.
@jakebrake I was a tad worried about that, but I'm on a server that has threads blocked. If it's just a boost, I'm willing to try it out.
Mostly want to see if I find an uptick in harassment.
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Friends, if you haven't already, it would be a big favour to me if you could enable tags.pub to boost your public tagged posts.
Just follow @_followback . It will follow you back, and when you make a post with a hashtag in it, the server will boost your post from the appropriate hashtag.
If you're interested in any topics, like @nokings , follow that account to get posts with that hashtag from across the Fediverse.
Let me know how it works for you!
And if you're interested in a hashtag, search for thathashtag at-symbol tags.pub in your Mastodon search UI and follow it there. It will boost all the content it finds with that tag to you.
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@jakebrake I was a tad worried about that, but I'm on a server that has threads blocked. If it's just a boost, I'm willing to try it out.
Mostly want to see if I find an uptick in harassment.
@jakebrake @evan The thing I like about this specifically is that it's an opt-in global booster. So many bots currently boost without our consent.
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@jakebrake I was a tad worried about that, but I'm on a server that has threads blocked. If it's just a boost, I'm willing to try it out.
Mostly want to see if I find an uptick in harassment.
I'm wondering about down the line.
To really work, this system needs to connect to basically every Fedi server, or at least all the big ones, right? Which sounds very centralized to me. And, if it does become a popular thing, gives SWF leverage over the Fediverse: Want your posts "fully" boosted, you need to talk to SWF.
Maybe I'm missing something?
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@mayintoronto one reason is because your friend Evan asked you to do it as a favour.
Another reason is that when you "follow" a hashtag in Mastodon, it only filters the content that got to your server for other reasons.
There are three ways that content arrived: either you follow the author, someone else on your server follows the author, or your server is subscribed to a relay.
tags.pub lets you follow a hashtag globally, not just filter what got to your server.
@evan @mayintoronto This description sounds like following a tags.pub via hashtag is even more limited as it only gets tags from people who’ve opted into tags.pub.
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@evan @mayintoronto This description sounds like following a tags.pub via hashtag is even more limited as it only gets tags from people who’ve opted into tags.pub.
@Chigaze @mayintoronto Yes, it's still in its early stages, but the architecture is made so it can handle more and more content over time. The system is opt-in for individuals, but servers and whole platforms can opt in, also.
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This gives me the heebie-jeebies. "Global" makes me uncomfortable. Automatic boosting makes me uncomfortable. Both are not particularly Fediverse-type concepts.
Here's the intro page on this (note that Social Web Foundation lists Meta and Auttomatic as partners):
Introducing tags.pub
tags.pub is a new service under development by the Social Web Foundation. It is a global hashtag server -- it lets you follow a hashtag across the Fediverse. There's lots of information on the tags.pub home page, and I (Evan) did a talk about tags.pub at FOSDEM 2026. This blog post answers some basics about…
Social Web Foundation (socialwebfoundation.org)
Sorry, Evan, but no thank you.
@jakebrake @mayintoronto No problem! Nobody is obligated to use it. It's there to serve a purpose for people who want that feature.
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@evan Done; I didn't know about this, so thanks for that.
Reading the replies, it's surprising to me that people don't really understand how tags work here. I think maybe my world view is different because I'm on a single-user instance, so it's much more obvious to me that tags don't always have a lot of reach.
@sean Thanks so much! I appreciate it.
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Friends, if you haven't already, it would be a big favour to me if you could enable tags.pub to boost your public tagged posts.
Just follow @_followback . It will follow you back, and when you make a post with a hashtag in it, the server will boost your post from the appropriate hashtag.
If you're interested in any topics, like @nokings , follow that account to get posts with that hashtag from across the Fediverse.
Let me know how it works for you!
@evan I had questions. What is tags.pub? Why would I want it to boost my posts?
https://tags.pub explains most of it. Presumably someone has to pay for this. Is it just altruism?
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Friends, if you haven't already, it would be a big favour to me if you could enable tags.pub to boost your public tagged posts.
Just follow @_followback . It will follow you back, and when you make a post with a hashtag in it, the server will boost your post from the appropriate hashtag.
If you're interested in any topics, like @nokings , follow that account to get posts with that hashtag from across the Fediverse.
Let me know how it works for you!
@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
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@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.
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@julian OK. I use a separate key ID and actor ID for HTTP Signature, so that can throw off some implementations.
@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.
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Friends, if you haven't already, it would be a big favour to me if you could enable tags.pub to boost your public tagged posts.
Just follow @_followback . It will follow you back, and when you make a post with a hashtag in it, the server will boost your post from the appropriate hashtag.
If you're interested in any topics, like @nokings , follow that account to get posts with that hashtag from across the Fediverse.
Let me know how it works for you!
@evan This seems to me like subscribing to a relay in an instance. What's the difference?
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R relay@relay.infosec.exchange shared this topic
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@evan This seems to me like subscribing to a relay in an instance. What's the difference?
- 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.
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- 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.
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@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.
@evan@cosocial.ca confirming that I am now able to follow the followback bot <img class="not-responsive emoji" src="https://activitypub.space/assets/plugins/nodebb-plugin-emoji/emoji/android/1f604.png?v=f5cb62b0085" title="
" />Still unable to establish the relay, however, so I opened a ticket on the SWF repo there.
