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.
@inarticulatequilter @evan It's the latter. If you search for it via mastodon.art, you should find this profile:
@katzentratschen thank you!
@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!
@AzureKingfisher @mayintoronto When you block a domain, that information is stored in your server. Your server prevents requests by that domain for your content.
tags.pub doesn't check your blocks information; it just shares very minimal info to subscribers, and they can't get the full information if they are blocked.
If you'd like a demo, I can record a screencast for you, or you can test it yourself.
@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.
@mlanger @jakebrake @mayintoronto
You can definitely opt out of tags.pub! Nobody has to use it if they don't want to.
You can follow hashtags in Mastodon; many other servers on the Fediverse don't have that feature.
When you follow a hashtag in Mastodon, it only shows you content from people you follow, or from people who others on your instance follow. If someone posts on the Fediverse using a hashtag and nobody on your instance follows them, you won't see it.
@mlanger @jakebrake @mayintoronto you're right that there are very few followers for the hashtag accounts on tags.pub. We are just getting this service started.
We're actually pretty careful with bandwidth.
I am one of the authors of ActivityPub, and I wrote a programmer's guide for O'Reilly Media about the protocol. I try to use it as carefully as I can.
If nobody's following a hashtag account, no data gets delivered.
@evan @jakebrake @mayintoronto Yet every single time I use a hashtag I get a notification for each hashtag. Your system is obviously creating accounts for each hashtag.
I honestly don't understand why you think this is necessary when one of the benefits of mastodon over other systems is that you can easily follow hashtags. You are attempting to solve a problem that does not exist. (1/2)
@mlanger @jakebrake @mayintoronto
> You can follow hashtags in Mastodon; many other servers on the Fediverse don't have that feature.
> When you follow a hashtag in Mastodon, it only shows you content from people you follow, or from people who others on your instance follow. If someone posts on the Fediverse using a hashtag and nobody on your instance follows them, you won't see it.
@mlanger @jakebrake @mayintoronto I agree about the notifications. Right now, you either have to block the tags.pub server or turn off all boost notifications. I think we'll need to get a change made to Mastodon to let you hide boost notifications from a single server.
We do have one hashtag actor per hashtag, which lets people follow a specific hashtag. It's very lightweight, though.
When you follow a hashtag locally on your server, it only filters content that arrived at your server due to following.
So, if someone on the Fediverse posts with a hashtag, and nobody on your server follows them, you won't see the post.
tags.pub is trying to improve that, and bring you *all* the content posted with that tag.
@evan Done; I didn't know about this, so thanks for that.
Reading the replies, it's surprising to me that people don't really understand how tags work here. I think maybe my world view is different because I'm on a single-user instance, so it's much more obvious to me that tags don't always have a lot of reach.
@evan I had questions. What is tags.pub? Why would I want it to boost my posts?
https://tags.pub explains most of it. Presumably someone has to pay for this. Is it just altruism?
@edwiebe So, do you still have questions after reading the home page?
It's a project of the Social Web Foundation. We're a non-profit with the goal of making the Fediverse easier to use. We think that if tagged content connects more Fediverse servers, it makes our conversations better and people's experience here richer.
Development and maintenance of tags.pub is sponsored by a grant from the Sovereign Tech Agency.
Hey Evan.
Done! I posted a photo after following, and used two hashtags. Less than a minute later, I got notifications that it had been boosted, once per hashtag. Each boost was from an account corresponding to one hashtag I'd used.
That seems like the expected behaviour, but I figured I'd let you know what it did in case something seems amiss.
Cheers!
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