Thu 21 November 2024

'Nuff said. End of blog post.

Ok, well...

The funny thing about hashtags on the Fediverse is that they're actually needed, and serve a very similar purpose to hashtags on Twitter (In Pace Requiescat).

When hashtags were first developed, Twitter had no search function (or built-in RTs, or images, for that matter), so the hashtag was an independently-developed feature.

Hashtags helped turn the river of text that was Twitter into something more organized and searchable. This is no longer an issue on (what's left of) that platform. Twitter has global search, threading, image and video sharing, and retweets all baked-in. (Retweets were a manual endeavour in the early days: you would copy the person's tweet, reply to it, then append the original toot and shorten it if needed.)

On the Fediverse, there is no global search. Mastodon has recently rolled out this feature, but it's opt-in (which is the way it should be*). Therefore, hashtags are still the primary way to perform search and discovery on the fediverse, and they're incredibly useful when used for that.

* Follow-up post explaining this later today

But hashtags are more than just metadata tags. They're also useful as a kind of footnote or commentary, even transcending into the verbal world: You've probably heard someone say something like "hashtag blessed" or "hashtag not my problem" at the end of a sentence. Yeah, that's... pretty obnoxious. I don't do that. Please don't do that. Thanks.

Nevertheless, hashtags can represent a voice change, a way to speak self-referentially within a toot that can be very freeing. They provide an outlet for commentary, similar to saying "just kidding" at the end of a statement, or "/s" at the end of an internet post.

One other (short-lived) feature of hashtags on Mastodon specifically was the ability to circumvent toot length limits (which I often find frustrating). I don't have any examples handy, but there was a time when hashtags didn't count against the post length, and you could string on many words within a hashtag to create incredibly long and nearly un-readable sentences past your usual toot length limit (500 characters, on most instances).

But aside from those (honestly kind of annoying) fringe-benefits, hashtags are worth using on the fediverse because they make fediverse posts discoverable (when the poster wants to be discovered — more on that later).

Note: This article has a Part II!

Category: Tech Tagged: Computing Federated Services Language Non-religious post Non-technical post Philosophy WritingMonth