liannaA #Fediverse tech idea I've been considering for a while.
Hashtags can sometimes be annoying, right? Their primary application is finding posts related to a certain topic, including following one. Therefore, if I look for "horses", I want to find everything horse-related.
The following hashtags should therefore lead to the same set of posts:
- #horse
- #horses
- #equines
- #equine
- #horsetodon
Right? But that's not a reality. Some people tag with one of them, with multiple, or with none at all.
Similarly, #Döner, #Doener and perhaps even #Doner should lead to the same set of posts, right? And what about British-American-splits like how #Localization is #Localisation, and perhaps even #l10n as well? And #LGBT, #LGBTQ, #LBGTQ+, #LGBT+, #LGBTQIA and so on and so on also really should be one hashtag.
So what to do?
I propose:
We should introduce a second symbol for something like "fuzzy hashtags". Not the '#' symbol, but another; perhaps '&' or '~'.
That way I could tag my post '~horse', and it could appear on all hashtag feeds concerning the different spellings of horses! Or I could search for such a fuzzy hashtag.
The different variants could be crowdsourced, or overridden by instance mods. You could also opt-out of that system - your posts showing up in fuzzy searches, most likely.
This would also fix languages like German, where you have many inflected forms: #Männer #Mann #Mannes #Manns #Männern #Männers and so on should all lead to the same result.
Behold what I have to do to sign off on this post:
#MarkupLanguages #MarkupLanguage #Markup
Hashtags can sometimes be annoying, right? Their primary application is finding posts related to a certain topic, including following one. Therefore, if I look for "horses", I want to find everything horse-related.
The following hashtags should therefore lead to the same set of posts:
- #horse
- #horses
- #equines
- #equine
- #horsetodon
Right? But that's not a reality. Some people tag with one of them, with multiple, or with none at all.
Similarly, #Döner, #Doener and perhaps even #Doner should lead to the same set of posts, right? And what about British-American-splits like how #Localization is #Localisation, and perhaps even #l10n as well? And #LGBT, #LGBTQ, #LBGTQ+, #LGBT+, #LGBTQIA and so on and so on also really should be one hashtag.
So what to do?
I propose:
We should introduce a second symbol for something like "fuzzy hashtags". Not the '#' symbol, but another; perhaps '&' or '~'.
That way I could tag my post '~horse', and it could appear on all hashtag feeds concerning the different spellings of horses! Or I could search for such a fuzzy hashtag.
The different variants could be crowdsourced, or overridden by instance mods. You could also opt-out of that system - your posts showing up in fuzzy searches, most likely.
This would also fix languages like German, where you have many inflected forms: #Männer #Mann #Mannes #Manns #Männern #Männers and so on should all lead to the same result.
Behold what I have to do to sign off on this post:
#MarkupLanguages #MarkupLanguage #Markup
Essojadojef
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pawr
Marc Moskowitz