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.

#tagspub #hashtags #activitypub

@evan Is there a reason to do this when we can already follow hashtags?

@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.

@evan ah, so this would help a lot with say, @introduction for unfederated single user servers.

@evan @mayintoronto

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.

@evan

@mayintoronto The way tags.pub does boosts, we don't share any of your content with servers that you have blocked. So, hopefully, you shouldn't see an uptick in harassment.
@evan @mayintoronto how do you know which servers I've blocked personally? You cannot.

@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 @mayintoronto I didn't mean server side blocks but user side blocks. I have blocked domains that mastodon.art has not. The boost cannot be checked against that.