I'm suddenly seeing a lot of bot accounts using the hashtags I use on a regular basis. For example the bio will read
"Follow me if you're interested in the castanwyddeneccles hashtag. I'm a global hashtag sharing bot from tags.pub. When content with the castanwyddeneccles hashtag appears on the Social Web, this account will re-share the content to its followers."
Is this a thing now? I don't think I like it, and I'm blocking them as they pop up.
@Janet_52square @suearcher
I feel like they pull followers into following bots rather than people and # tags. It generates traffic in the wrong direction.
That made sense on Twitter, to make your bot account look popular, but I don't quite see a point to it here.
I block bots when I come across them.
Edit: just wondering if the bots are sharing the # tags across platforms so that Bluesky etc. also see them, and then you have no idea what folks there are doing with your toot.
@Maker_of_Things @Janet_52square @suearcher Yes, I'm blocking all of those as well, often their entire instances (since they're usually instances dedicated for these data harvesting bots).
The last one I blocked just this week even had "we respect #nobot tag in your profile!" blurb on their instance page, BUT THEY DIDN'T.
@ticho @Maker_of_Things @Janet_52square
Ah I did wonder if I could block the whole instance, I'll try that, thank you.
@suearcher @ticho @Maker_of_Things @Janet_52square
Apologies, this was me, I was experimenting with the new service and was exploring the relay option. This has now been disabled, your posts will no longer be seen by the hashtag service.
As an aside, you can indeed block the account or the entire service yourself (just like any other account or domain name), but as of this morning the connection is no longer happening so you shouldn't need to.
@jaz
Ahhh, ok, thanks for clarifying.
@jaz @ticho @Maker_of_Things @Janet_52square
Ah, thank you! Diolch!
@Maker_of_Things @Janet_52square @suearcher
I hadn't thought of that. 😬
Yes, that was my thinking, that the hashtag should be enough.
@ja Right, I think I see.
I'm not really bothered about how many people see most of my hashtags - especially the ones that pretty much only I use. So I didn't really see the point of a bot like that.
@suearcher @ja Just for background, because of the decentral nature of our network, if Bob wants to see posts about #knitting, Bob can follow that hashtag but will only ever see posts about knitting that Bob's server (eg toot.wales) knows about.
So if Jane at new-knitting-community.club starts posting using that hashtag, Bob may never know.
Relays and tag boosters (which are a basic component of open social like Mastodon) make Jane's public posts visible to Bob.
@suearcher @ja Following hashtags is something that some platforms like Mastodon and Pixelfed allow you to do, but not all open social platforms have this feature.
Services like tags.pub fill that gap by making the hashtag an account you can follow even if you don't know or can't yet see all the people using that tag.
To preserve boundaries, I strongly recommend using the Mastodon settings for "indexable" and "discoverable" to minimise the footprint of your account to these sorts of services.
@suearcher @ja Lastly, we monitor all of these services, and we allow those that demonstrate standards-based approaches that observe and respect community norms.
Those that do not, or that demonstrate any form of malicious behaviour, we block at the service level, just like we do with federating domains.
Sue Archer
Janet
Alfred Chow - Maker of Things
ticho
jaz 
Her Doing
Richard Rollinson
Jake Averill