People mention a lot how important hashtags are for discovery on mastodon/fedi, but one thing I never see mentioned is that when you follow or search for an HT, you only get results from posts that have federated to your instance (ie posts made/boosted by someone at least one person on your instance follows).
On huge instances, nbd; but on smaller ones, HTs may seem significantly less active than they really are.
If you like following HTs, boosting HTed posts makes it a more effective feature.
Some people misunderstanding in the replies.
The set of posts from which you can search for hashtags isn’t just what the people on your instance post/boost. It’s also all the posts/boosts made by every account on the entire fediverse *that is followed by one or more accounts on your instance*.
This set of posts is also what you see when you check the “federated” timeline for your instance.
discover friends on Island instances should be a Mastodon Wide Holiday!
Lets dev ways to make that happen. (Sharing hastags?)
@jepyang as a [formerly single-user] small instance admin this was a real challenge.
I ended up peering with a bunch of relays that seemed to have mostly common interests, but there are some downsides there too.
Just getting an up-to-date list of active relays, what they're about, and filtering out ones that include vitriolic instances, was difficult enough.
If the emphasis is adoptability and single-user/small instances, this is really something that needs attention.
@jepyang I guess. I’ll try encouraging them more on mine.
They’re just so exploitable.
@JoshuaACNewman Fwiw, I’m kinda neutral on hashtags themselves. I know a lot of people don’t like them for various reasons, and in general I think their utility is kind of overstated to newbies. If you don’t end up on a huge instance (and that’s probably for the best) then it’s probably confusing why everyone’s telling you to use HTs but nothing shows up on your HT searches.
But if you *do* like HTs, then boosting your favorites helps propagate them across the fedi.
@comingupviolets One, not sure what you mean by “nah.” I’m allowed to feel how I feel, and I like the federated model.
Two, “only what’s being posted by people on my one server” is not how it works.
@botolo86 Not quite. It’s all the posts made or boosted by everyone that at least one person on your instance *follows* (plus everything posted/boosted on your instance).
Basically your instance has a list of accounts on other instances that it knows it needs to download every new post/boost from—based on your follows and the follows of everyone else on your instance. This is what you see on your “federated” timeline, and is the collection of posts that you can search for hashtags.
@botolo86 From the other side of the equation:
Say you make a post tagged # synthDIY. It gets downloaded to the instances of everyone who follows you. If anyone else on their instances follows # synthDIY, they will also see your post. But that’s as far as your post goes…unless someone else boosts it, and it goes to the instances of everyone who follows *them*. Then the people who follow # synthDIY on those instances will get your post too!
@botolo86 > I assume that I will get results of all messages posted with that hashtag from all the instances connected to my instance, whether someone in my instance boosted that or not.
Neither of these are actually what is happening.
Instances don’t really “connect” with one another. It’s kind of implied that this is the case with the way we talk about instances federating with other instances, but it’s more of a passive relationship: merely the absence of defederation.
Cont’d…
@botolo86 Your instance doesn’t really do anything with other instances other than verify that neither one blocks the other.
What *actively* federates with your instance are individual posts. Your instance decides which posts to download based on the follow lists of everyone on the instance. This set of posts (plus all posts that originate on your instance) are what you access when you search a hashtag.
Cont’d…
@jerome The issue of replies can at least be worked around by viewing the post on the originating server. Annoying, and would be nice if this functionality were automatic (or even invisible) but at least it’s there.
I’m not aware of a workaround for hashtags, outside of going to especially large and well-federated instances and searching there. But that still limits what you see, it just changes the limits.
@jepyang
You can follow tags from relay.fedi.buzz to get results federated from many instances, large and small! Regardless of your own instance's size
Handy side-effect: you don't have to be instance admin. Anyone on Mastodon can follow these relay endpoints. Though you can already follow hashtags your instance sees, this floods your home timeline with all that #FediBuzz can see.
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