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@evan Yes, and I entirely forgot until you made me think to try to follow some. I was already following them.
Here's another advantage I realized about #tagsPub : on platforms (like Mastodon) where you can enable posting notifications, you can follow a tag on tags.pub and get notified when someone posts on that tag.
@jmtd no time like the present!
Also, let me know how it works with Pleroma.
@evan
I can just follow hashtags. Why do I need a third party bot for that?
@alterelefant @evan This was my thought. On pachli I can organize multiple followed hashtags into feed. Not sure why I need this tool.
We have a FAQ for this!
You don't get all the content when you follow a hashtag through Mastodon, especially on small and medium-sized servers.
Please let me know if you have other questions!
@alterelefant
For the same reason you didn't see the same question several hours ago 😅
https://mastodon.mallegolhansen.com/@philip/116530251563105515
@alterelefant
That's by design, but not everyone expects it. And sometimes people want information from sources they can't access or aren't familiar with.
@evan
@beandev
The thing here is that there is a difference between instances that have never been federated with the instance my account is on and instances that have been defederated by that instance. The end result is however the same. Posts won't be shown and there is probably a reason for not showing posts of unfederated or defederated instances. It keeps out spam bots and rogue instances.
@evan
@alterelefant
Maybe you don't get my point.
My original response referred to the FAQ explaining why the service exists. And your question about why one shouldn’t just use hashtag-follow has been asked before—ironically, that’s the very technical reason why the tag service exists in the first place.
That’s all I wanted to say.
You don’t have to use the service if you don’t like it.
@beandev
The point I was trying to get across is that my key worrie is if this service is able to successfully identify and filter out rogue instances and spam bots? Or will bad actors be able to freely spam massive numbers of subscribers to this service like we see hashtags spam on the centralized social media platforms like the death bird site and blues ky?
@evan
@beandev
As far as I understand it there is no technical difference between unfederated and defederated. Some instances might publicly publish a list of defederated instances. Most of the time these lists seem to be manual updaten and will therefore not be entirely up to date. Plenty of instances never publish a list of defederated instances, probably because it is too much work.
@evan
@alterelefant @beandev that's a great point! The big thing to know is that tags.pub respects blocks both ways.
If your server blocks another server, the content shared by tags.pub from that server will not appear in your timeline.
And vice versa; stuff you post will not appear in the timeline of users on a server you blocked.
I hope that helps.
@evan@cosocial.ca No, but I tried. I followed, and it followed me back as expected. However, my follow request is just sitting there spinning as "processing" and the tags.pub account does not appear in my following list.
@arth yeah, someone else using Sharkey had a similar problem. I'll see what I can do to debug it!
@evan yes, but I'm not sure how much it helps. I don't see a lot of posts from the bots yet. I sometimes wonder about the follower counts of the followback bot... does it have enough followers to make a difference yet? Shows 558 followers to me, and some are from cosocial.ca anyway.
@evan @alterelefant @mike now that I know you are involved in this project, I will follow it.
@evan yes, because you asked us to 😅 The newbie in the room doesn't fully understand the FAQ for tags.pub or the followback bot as fedi is still a bit of a mystery to me. I have not seen the tags bot getting me any posts, while I have seen followback boost my posts. I believe in it because someone I trust (you) told it was a net positive. I have a poll on about believing in something because you trust the source.. I guess this is my example.
@johnefrancis it's not just followers to the followback; it's also getting content from relays.
@johnefrancis So, I checked your data; about 261 posts from tags that you follow to cosocial.ca's inbox in the last 24 hours. I'm not seeing any errors. Some of them may be getting hidden by Mastodon; if you get something boosted to you multiple times, it will only show it to you once.
Thanks so much to the 25% of respondents who are following a hashtag bot through tags.pub. I appreciate it very much!
To those who haven't: why not? I think friends on the Fediverse know that this is important for me.
Do you not know me personally?
Or are we not good enough friends that you would try a product I worked hard on?
Or do you not understand why https://tags.pub/#why tags.pub exists?
Let me know what I need to do to get you on board.
@evan those are 261 posts via tags.pub that wouldn't otherwise arrive on cosocial.ca's federated feed? That's pretty good. 👍
@johnefrancis I don't have that information ready at hand, unfortunately.
@evan
I already follow some tags via fedi.buzz and that works well enough.
The integration of tags.pub as an auxiliary service provider for Mastodon sounds promising though, I might check it out then.
@evan I don't really follow hashtags so that explains my no, but if there's a way to access the things I miss about hashtags, I would do that. I miss trending hashtags. I mean, they exist but fail for the same reason you made the hashtag bot. But having that work properly would be amazing. Maybe I should start following hashtags more now that you've developed this, but I've trained myself out of looking at hashtags on here.
@elettrona I will check! Great question.
Until then, you can follow @_followback and it will follow you back and your tagged posts will be shared by the appropriate hashtag bot.
@elettrona also, there's at least one other service that does the same thing (fedibuzz). Our software is Free and Open Source software; I'd love to see others set up similar services. I'd definitely make sure we could share content between us.
@evan I already follow hashtags through mastodon's hashtag follow. My sites with AP that don't have that feature, I'm very limited in server resources so I keep follows very limited.
@WestLawns oh, cool!
Maybe you'd like tags like @climatechange or @biodiversity ?