Friends, if you haven't already, it would be a big favour to me if you could enable tags.pub to boost your public tagged posts.
Just search for @_followback in your Mastodon UI. Click the follow button there. (Don't try to follow from the profile page; it doesn't work yet.)
It will follow you back, and when you make a post with a hashtag in it, the server will boost your post from the appropriate hashtag.
@mayintoronto one reason is because your friend Evan asked you to do it as a favour.
Another reason is that when you "follow" a hashtag in Mastodon, it only filters the content that got to your server for other reasons.
There are three ways that content arrived: either you follow the author, someone else on your server follows the author, or your server is subscribed to a relay.
tags.pub lets you follow a hashtag globally, not just filter what got to your server.
This gives me the heebie-jeebies. "Global" makes me uncomfortable. Automatic boosting makes me uncomfortable. Both are not particularly Fediverse-type concepts.
Here's the intro page on this (note that Social Web Foundation lists Meta and Auttomatic as partners):
https://socialwebfoundation.org/2026/03/17/introducing-tags-pub/
Sorry, Evan, but no thank you.
@jakebrake I was a tad worried about that, but I'm on a server that has threads blocked. If it's just a boost, I'm willing to try it out.
Mostly want to see if I find an uptick in harassment.
I'm wondering about down the line.
To really work, this system needs to connect to basically every Fedi server, or at least all the big ones, right? Which sounds very centralized to me. And, if it does become a popular thing, gives SWF leverage over the Fediverse: Want your posts "fully" boosted, you need to talk to SWF.
Maybe I'm missing something?
@jakebrake @mayintoronto I totally get the concern about centralisation. I think there are two mitigations for that issue.
The first is that there are two other services that do something similar already: https://relay.fedi.buzz/ and tagpush.
The other is that the tags.pub software is Free and Open Source software; anyone can set up their own server using the software. If you decide to do that (I hope you do!), please let me know, and we can figure out how to share public data.
Thanks Evan for listening to my concerns and for your thoughtful replies!
One of the really neat things about the Fediverse is that us in the peanut gallery can reach out to folks like you who are building and improving the "plumbing" of the place, and vote with our posts. It is a special thing, and I try not to squander it by overuse or by being snarky or rude, mostly.
TBH, I do like Fedi how it is, semi-useful search and not-quite-boosts and all. So, yeah. 🤷
@AzureKingfisher @mayintoronto we can't and we don't want to.
tags.pub does not share the full content of your post; just a link. When a subscriber to a tags.pub account receives the boost, it has to go fetch the content from your server.
When it asks for the content from your server, your server checks against your blocklist. If the subscriber is blocked, your server won't return the post.
I hope that explains it!
@evan
But Evan, don't you see? If *someone* on the Fediverse doesn't like it, it shouldn't exist!
That's why Mastodon was wiped out years ago by Diaspora users.
@jakebrake @mayintoronto
@jakebrake @mayintoronto Hey, Jake. Your concerns are justified! It's never a bad idea to look at projects carefully.
tags.pub is one of the oldest projects on the ActivityPub network. It was one of the test implementations of ActivityPub. It's been dormant for years; we've been lucky enough to get to implement this with funding from the Sovereign Tech Agency.
The service is opt-in, either by user or by server (and users can opt out if their server opted in). Nobody has to use it.
Evan Prodromou
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