pettter ✅Apr 5, 2017
So, for all you new users, there's this OStatus thing called "groups", which is indicated with a bang ( ! ), where you can follow, say, a topic (music, security, crypto, games and whatnot), or a specific thing (emacs, coffee etc.), or even a greeting (the tzag group for Time Zone Appropriate Greetings), regardless of who posts about it.

It's a pretty powerful tool, all things considered, and !fediverse and !fedgroups may be of interest for exploring what's out there.

Also, for all you infosec peeps there's of course the !security group, there's also one for !musicians, for !ccmusic, for your current !listening habits, etc.

A limitation is that groups live on a specific instance, though I think there might be proposals to mitigate that...  
Show thread🔜@[email protected]
@pettter so they're like instance-scoped hashtags?
Apr 5, 2017 at 7:26pmWeb
Show threadpettter ✅Apr 5, 2017
@parataxis I explained it badly I think - a group "lives" on an instance, but anyone can join it, and post/receive updates from it. So !dumpsterdiving lives on quitter.se, meaning that's where you go to join/leave/admin the group, and watch the complete group timeline. But once you've joined a group, you'll get all those posts to your own timeline (regardless if you follow the person or not, or even someone on their instance), and can post to the group from your own instance etc.

The real downside to this way of doing things is if/when instances go down, they take all their groups with them. So !fediverse was for example a fairly large group (15k members or so) of things that were relevant to the whole federated network, but oracle.skilledtests.com went down for reasons unrelated, so that whole group died and has yet to be resurrected. Likewise with some groups on status.vinilox.eu etc... See http://www.skilledtests.com/wiki/List_of_federated_Statusnet_groups on web.archive.org 
Show threadpettter ✅Apr 5, 2017
@parataxis So in some sense groups are actually _less_ instance-scoped than hashtags.
Show thread🔜@[email protected]Apr 5, 2017
@pettter so unlike hashtags for a group to exist someone has to create it?
Show threadAlanApr 5, 2017
@pettter this is strange – do you know why this toot is showing up in my personal timeline? I don't follow you, no one I follow boosted it, and I'm not mentioned. Bug?