Evan ProdromouOne hard thing about building #tagspub is that people get mad that it is needed. A lot of Mastodon users think that following a hashtag on Mastodon gets you *all* of the content tagged with that hashtag from the entire Fediverse. When they read https://tags.pub/#why , or I tell them, they get mad that Mastodon doesn't work that way. But it couldn't! Your server doesn't have access to all that data.
But #SWF want it to work better, too! We think access to fresh content relevant to your interests is one of the things that gets people excited about the Fediverse. That's why we built #tagspub to begin with.
#tagspub was one of the first #ActivityPub projects, which I built as a POC. It was one of the implementations that showed interoperability when ActivityPub was still being standardized.
When I first set up my own Mastodon server at https://prodromou.pub/ a few years ago, my friend @bengo noted that we still didn't have global hashtag servers. "You have to get tags.pub back online so I can follow tags!" I'd honestly forgotten about the project before he reminded me.
That's why I insisted that it be an SWF priority. I was glad that we got a contract from the @sovtechfund to build out the features and make it work correctly.
Astro