Edited below. I imagine many of us are here from reddit, where hashtags weren’t really a thing and in many places mentions were actively discouraged (/r/politics I’m looking at you). However, since everything we post or comment on kbin (and lemmy) has the potential of getting federated on a mastodon server, which leans heavily on hashtags and mentions, should we be promoting the use of hashtags and mentions, in an effort to-- I dunno-- kind of tie everything together a little more neatly?
If the answer is “yeah, we probably should” then I’d also suggest that there be an option added to the settings to auto-populate the hashtags associated with the magazine to every post and another to add them to every top-level comment, very similar to how we have the option to auto-populate mentions for posts and comments.
Does this “Tags” field, when making a new thread/post, actually do anything with respect to this, or is that more for kbin-related stuff?
Oh, and, uh… #hashtags #kbin #fediverse
Feels weird to do that.
Edit: So, I did some brief testing, and have noted the following:
- Hashtags associated with the magazine are auto-populated at the end of the mastodon snippet.
- Hashtags added to the
tagsfield are likewise added to the end of the mastodon snippet. - Hashtags in the body text are seen as hashtags, but for reasons that might just be mastodon weirdness, searching for the hashtag doesn’t display the associated post.
- Hashtags in the body but more than ~350 characters into the body (i.e., past the point the snippet cuts it off) do not display.
Edit2: Mostly unrelated, but when I mention the “snippet” above, it seems like it is created by the first ~350 characters of the first paragraph. That is to say, if your first paragraph is 10 characters, then a blank line, then 100 more characters-- the snippet will only be 10 characters long.
What happens with magazines that don’t have tags set, like kbinMeta? It seems that kbin people can select a magazine when they make a new post but (I don’t have a Mastodon account) do people from Mastodon have some way to make their post show up in kbinMeta’s microblog section or follow kbinMeta’s thread/microblog contents?
As someone who has never used Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon, Tumblr or Facebook. How does hashtag work?
It’s a keyword search. On Twitter, it was used to help people more easily find specific topics of discussion, and on mastodon, there is no plain text search-- you can find people, or hashtags-- so if you want your post to be discoverable outside people that already follow you, you need to use hashtags.
So how do you know what the hashtag people use is? Like how do you know it’s # with totk, tearsofthekingdom, ZeldaTotk, TotKcontraption, TotKvehicle, TotKvehicles, TotK_vehicle or something else? Or what new hashtags are there?
The autopopulate would have to be optional for the magazine, though.
I have started using hashtags so we get microblogs in @worldwithoutus
While it’s a start, I realized many of the hashtags are too broad for a news sub - someone posting news from, say, Thailand, is not likely to use the hashtag #Asia. So I was thinking about adding country specific tags.
That will be a lot of hashtags, and if it prepopulates submissions it will make the magazine un-useable.
yeah I think it would be good to do more. hashtags are clunky and an eyesore, and I would love to see better support of them that mitigates this. But currently they are the main way to signal discoverability on the fediverse. And posts on kbin are (usually) made with the intention that the public can interact with them.
One thing I would like to see is an extra field when you submit your post where you can add in some hashtags. These can be rendered as Tags in activitypub, which do exactly the same thing as hashtags, except that they are not visible in the main body of the text. The ActivityPub wordpress plugin also does this. I add tags to my posts on wordpress, and when you search for that hashtag, my wordpress blog post shows up, even though you’ll not find the hashtag anywhere in the body of the text.
kbin has this feature; I’m just not sure if it works like you describe. I need to play around more to do some testing, I guess.
Awesome! This approach seems quite functional and elegant. I don’t want to see hashtags, but having them exist invisibly (unless you click on something to show the hashtags for a post) would be great.
Great question! I’m curious as well.
I followed my Lemmy profile from Mastodon yesterday and didn’t see anything. Just checked today and see my post without hashtags! Nice!
Yeah, but if I understand how Mastodon functions, you can only search for hashtags… so people that don’t follow you and weren’t looking at the federated “all” view when you posted will never be likely to find your post. I am pretty sure Mastodon leans a lot on the use of hashtags to function. I know that I only follow a few people but I follow several hashtags. I don’t know if this is a normal use, though.
@effingjoe So you pref topic-based Mastodon to people-based. I don’t know the percentages on that but it makes sense you’re active here on kbin.
@eddietrax I follow my Kbin profile from Mastodon, and I do see hashtags. Kbin has better integration with Mastodon, the microblog section on our instances picks up Mastodon posts that are tagged. Both Lemmy and Kbin posts, though, can be boosted from Mastodon and replied to from Mastodon.
Yes, #Hashtags are important. Without the hashtag #Fediverse, I wouldn’t have seen this post, for example.
I assume this is through Mastodon? I think you could’ve if you subscribed to the kbin meta magazine, but of course hashtags make things more visible for other platforms. On kbin you wouldn’t search too much through hashtags, but I think they also help with search indexing. My only issue with them is that they can often get abused quickly through hashtag spam, especially of particular viral topics, which might not even be related to whatever someone is posting.
I think you could’ve if you subscribed to the kbin meta magazine
I don’t think that’s how it works. Looking at the magazine from mastodon, I don’t see any posts nor boosts. It’s just empty. I doubt following the magazine from mastodon helps at all with discovering content on it.
