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.