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.
-
@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.
-
@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.
-
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.
-
@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.
-
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?
-
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
-
@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.
-
@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.
-
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?
-
R relay@relay.infosec.exchange shared this topic
-
@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.
-
- 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.
-
@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.
