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.
@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.
Evan Prodromou
May Likes Toronto
Solo la 🌍 salva a la 🌎
Maria Langer | 📝🛥️💎