Chris TrottierThis is why social discovery on the Fediverse doesn’t work well.
Members of marginalized communities want to find affinity.
Hashtags don’t work.
Hashtags don’t work well for social discovery because:
1. They can refer to multiple things. For example, when you use #apple is it for the fruit or company?
2. They’re unmoderated and can be used by anyone for whatever reason
3. They’re awful for long phrases
4. They can be easily spammed
5. They don’t actually signify “opt-in” but can just as easily signify something meta
The logic of “only use hashtags for discovery” falls apart in that search itself often requires context.
For example, #tea can mean many things.
Is it referring to the beverage or gossip?
Sometimes I want to use hashtags but I can’t because I acknowledge that a community needs to claim it.
Using hashtags in place of groups is a hack, and does not function well for social discovery.
Back when I was using Twitter, I wrote that Cosmic Crisp was the biggest launch in #apple history.
That statement upset a lot of people.
But I was referring to the apple (fruit) industry not the apple (tech) industry.
And I was meaning to share news for apple (fruit) fans—Cosmic Crisp was a big deal!
In this silly sense, hashtags failed me.
On the Fediverse, the biggest failure of “hashtag as social discovery” is, ironically, the Fediblock hashtag.
People use it to discover instances to block.
But Fediblock is discussed so much as a meta concept that the hashtag is becoming more useless as time goes on.
Looks like group federation has been finalized.
Which should go a long way in solving many problems involving social discovery on the Fediverse.
https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/feps/fep-1b12.md
Mark Darbyshire@atomicpoet Awesome! And this was done in the last few months and finalised only a week ago! I don't think I appreciated quite how ActivityPub is under active development!
maegul@mark @atomicpoet yea!
I presume it’s this proposal being cited: FEP-1b12 (issue number 22).
Interestingly, as far as I can tell, it’s also coming very much out of the other platforms (ie not Mastodon) … ? I know I saw some of the #Lemmy folks talking/happy about it.
@atomicpoet @mark Huh … how does that work exactly? You’re using a #Friendica forum or something? Any web links to something we can look at? I’m guessing that following it in a mastodon client won’t work (I haven’t looked into Friendica) …?
@maegul @mark @maegul @mark Yes it will work, and you can even contribute to the group through mastodon by following @fediversenews.
If you want to know what this looks like from Friendica, view this URL: https://venera.social/profile/fediversenews
paulmather007@atomicpoet @maegul @mark @fediversenews So you join a group following someone and then post to the group by @-ing a handle? I’m intrigued by the functionality but I think for an average person it will be confusing that the same behavior produces different results depending on whether you @ a user or a group. I wonder if there’s a way to differentiate between users and groups, either on the client side or by using a different syntax for users than groups?
@paulmather007 @atomicpoet @mark @fediversenews I agree.
I think we’re essentially on a train while the tracks are being laid ahead of us, which is kinda fun!
In the end I suspect it’ll be up to the clients to manage the raw syntax requirements in a more user friendly way as we’re accustomed to in email clients and web browsers, like how we don’t have to type “http” anymore.
@maegul @atomicpoet @mark @fediversenews Yes although I don’t know enough about this system to understand whether clients will even be able to differentiate between groups and individuals, if they’re both designated by @ ?
@paulmather007 @atomicpoet @mark @fediversenews good question! Don’t know myself. I’d imagine there’s something in the API the client could ping and use to understand what it is.
Otherwise it does feel weird to rely entirely on parsing the text of the message, compared to say email with its fields for CC, BCC etc.
Sebastien 🌍 🇵🇸🇺🇦 @atomicpoet I hope you are not an #Ivory collector looking to share your knowledge 😈
Christian@SebastienK @atomicpoet I see what you did there 😆
LAUREN@atomicpoet
*pause to chuckle*
*pause to chuckle*
Paul Chambers🚧
@atomicpoet Yeah, groups are hugely popular and useful on Facebook, and I would love to see a federated equivalent take off in popularity. The closest thing would be mailing lists, where they can be public or private and you can sign up using any email provider.
@mark @atomicpoet Agree. A solution to groups exists: https://a.gup.pe/.
Works pretty well and seems like a good and somewhat scalable model for it to be more mainstream.
The group is a bot/account that boosts every post it’s mentioned in. Follow the bot and get everything posted to the “group”.
Making a new group is easy, just mention the name you want for it and it will be created if it doesn’t exist.
Does rely on admins/instances though, like all else here.
ghostdancer@mark There were groups on identi.ca and it was a really useful feature. Would love to se it the fediverse. @atomicpoet
Geotechland@atomicpoet good points!
Groups are being worked on so that feature may come soon 🤓
Howlin’ Hobbita community needs to claim it? the LGBTQ+BS community has “claimed” the word queer. according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first definition of queer is “strange; odd.”
this would include me, even though I’m heterosexual. I mean *really*, I play ukulele. that’s twee at best. queer as fuck would describe me, amirite?
Quick Weasel 🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈@atomicpoet That's a problem with the English language, not a problem with hashtags. ;)
@QuickWeasel I personally can’t use hashtags without speaking English. It’s the only language I speak well.
Bodhipaksa@atomicpoet @QuickWeasel I’m failing to see the problem here. Hashtags can be ambiguous? Do the work and figure out what content they’re being used in.
Samuel Sutch@atomicpoet TIL #tea is more than just a beverage hah...
TL Ibson@atomicpoet
Is there an alternative that does work well for discovery?
Is there an alternative that does work well for discovery?
@TagTeamInt Groups could work.
I like that too... but you're saying there's no good solution available now?
@TagTeamInt Sure, there is. Lemmy, for example. But Lemmy is not Mastodon.
Oblomov@atomicpoet honestly that's a bit flimsy. If one's aim is, as in the screenshot, to find people, hashtags do work —as long as people do put then in their posts— because through the hashtag you still find people to follow, even if the hashtag is too ambiguous to be worth following, or if you need to search for multiple variants of the hashtag and scroll through a few posts.
Rufus J. Cooter@oblomov @atomicpoet right, but you understand how much work "...-as long as people..." is doing here, right? I mean, that's an, "Assume a can opener..." level qualification
@RufusJCooter @atomicpoet yeah but people not using them doesn't mean they don't work. Condoms are extremely effective at avoiding unwanted pregnancies and the spread of STDs, but if you don't use them you don't get those benefits. You may claim that you don't want to use them for whatever reason (that's up to you (and your partner(s) in the condom case)), but any claim that they don't work is easily rebuked.
@RufusJCooter @atomicpoet so on the contrary anyone finding hashtags lacking because of low usage should be encouraging others to use them more
the roamerMany relevant points on the limitations of hashtags, important to keep in mind.
@atomicpoet #hashtags are a "quick, cheap" discovery method, just a part of the overall story. There are no definitive answers to social discovery, a successful product will require a matrix of solutions, offered at different engagement points.
Andrew Baldwin@atomicpoet also they only find posts with that hashtag that your instance already has and on small instances that is only a tiny subset of all posts
Ian Tindale@atomicpoet I will discourage the use of hashtags because people keep inserting them inline into body copy, and hashtags inevitably have extremely poor visibility, so I can’t see them – it just looks like there’s inexplicable gaps in the paragraph
Here in this screenshot of what you’re saying, I can’t read the hashtags, they just blend in with the background so in reading I skip over the gap and now nothing makes sense (presumably you did make sense when you typed it all :-) )