A
#Fediverse tech idea I've been considering for a while.
Hashtags can sometimes be annoying, right? Their primary application is finding posts related to a certain topic, including following one. Therefore, if I look for "horses", I want to find everything horse-related.
The following hashtags should therefore lead to the same set of posts:
-
#horse-
#horses-
#equines-
#equine-
#horsetodonRight? But that's not a reality. Some people tag with one of them, with multiple, or with none at all.
Similarly,
#Döner,
#Doener and perhaps even
#Doner should lead to the same set of posts, right? And what about British-American-splits like how
#Localization is
#Localisation, and perhaps even
#l10n as well? And
#LGBT,
#LGBTQ, #LBGTQ+, #LGBT+,
#LGBTQIA and so on and so on also really should be one hashtag.
So what to do?
I propose:
We should introduce a second symbol for something like "fuzzy hashtags". Not the '#' symbol, but another; perhaps '&' or '~'.
That way I could tag my post '~horse', and it could appear on all hashtag feeds concerning the different spellings of horses! Or I could search for such a fuzzy hashtag.
The different variants could be crowdsourced, or overridden by instance mods. You could also opt-out of that system - your posts showing up in fuzzy searches, most likely.
This would also fix languages like German, where you have many inflected forms:
#Männer #Mann #Mannes #Manns #Männern #Männers and so on should all lead to the same result.
Behold what I have to do to sign off on this post:
#MarkupLanguages #MarkupLanguage #Markup