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.
Mark Darbyshire@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.
maegul@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.
