There has been a lot of froth about tags.pub the last few days. I feel like I've already said what I'm going to on that subject. Although I rose to it's defense, it did motivate me to fix one thing that had been bugging me.

I went to extra effort to get my blog/podcast site feeding **in** to tags.pub. That required figuring out Bridgy Fedi login stuff and getting the bridged account to follow @_followback which was a bit of a pain in the ass. Eventually it worked.

However, then the problem was that when #11ty assembled the webmentions for each post which it has been doing dutifully for the last year and a half, those would be swamped with the tags.pub bots. Particularly on my podcast episodes where I have a lot of topics and a lot of tags, the first 15 interactions could be the bots.

So, I sat down and wrote a filter to strip out the webmentions before I render them on the page.

<code>

eleventyConfig.addFilter('removeTagsPub', (webmentions) => {
return webmentions.filter((webmention) => {
return webmention['author']['url'].startsWith('https://tags.pub') == false;
});
});
</code>

It does work a treat. Now I get the advantage of pushing to tags.pub and hopefully increasing the discoverability of my fairly niche indie project while not having to look at lots of "#thistag boosted your post" webmentions on every blog post. Win-win.

#tagspub #eleventy

I want a big fedi and see social media as essentially about the public conversation and getting attention. I want hashtags to work well here without bots but otherwise can't understand the concern.

#TagsPub

I wonder why everyone seems to hate the tags.pub bot so much.

I mean: Until now, there was no way no get a notification if somebody posts something with a hashtag you're subscribed to.

This is a great feature, especially for hashtags with a low number of occurrences, greatly enhancing the value of the Fediverse for information purposes.

Just asking.

Edit: There's some good discussion below, worth reading. Also including some arguments for being sceptical about this thing.

#TagsPub

"You pointed out how I was violating consent and opting others into my bot-farm against their will and now I'm receiving abuse so f*ck you" is perhaps not the flex the author intended it to be.

#consent #TagsPub #hashtag #ReplyGuy