Am I overreacting? The server @tags.pub takes every of my toots that contain any hashtag, and boost it using an account that has the name of said hashtag.
If I want to follow a hashtag, there is native feature for that within mastodon / activity pub. So my knee jerk reaction is that this is some shady click harvesting. Or?
@MichalBryxi fair enough to block it if you want, I suspect it's intent is that people on smaller servers would follow the tags because reachability is a bit rubbish in smaller corners of the fediverse.
There used to be another thing which you could @ with your tag/thing instead and that'd flow through to people but alas, discovery was an issue again.
@MichalBryxi also they provide a means to opt-out, add #NoBots to your bio (which to be fair, if you don't want automated stuff is a pretty common thing - most well ran ones respect that so may have other upside for you)
Michal Bryxí
AlexIf your server is providing data to tags.pub, and you don't want your content to be boosted by tags.pub accounts, you can add the #NoTagsPub hashtag to your account bio. (If you've already got a #NoBots hashtag in your account bio, we'll also skip any boosts.)
I find this habit of creating magic profile hashtags to be a real bad practice, especially when modeling opt-outs in app-specific manner. cc @evan
@smallcircles @MichalBryxi @evan would be awesome if there was an actual in protocol solution instead of punishing very small instances for being small and distributed - but there isn't.
The NoBot isn't app specific fwiw, it's pretty standard.
> The NoBot isn't app specific fwiw, it's pretty standard.
"pretty" boils down to de-facto standard, or rather it became a sorta kinda requirement by means of post-facto #interoperability. In other words: Who comes first, and popularizes some custom app-specific extension, becomes owner of that part of the spec that is now considered protocol-native.
#NoBot is app-specific too. Or Microblogging domain-specific perhaps, albeit implicitly then.
When it comes to considering it standard, we talk about accepting #ActivityPub protocol decay. Specifically:
- Considering the way account profiles are handled to be part of the protocol.
- To handle special control words (or just #NoBot) in the profile text.
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