Fri 22 November 2024

In Part II, I described the protective function of hashtags. I will now delve into a more entertaining aspect of how they can be used.

Whenever I share a blog post I've just written on the fediverse, I always use the hashtag #rlDaneWriting. It's an easy way for me to find previous posts (and to use them as a kind of template for a new one), and for others to find new blog posts, if they so choose.

But I have many others I use, sometimes purely (or chiefly) for my own benefit:

#LossyPNG - I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and the stark, pastelly look of the computer graphics of the 16-bit era left an indelible fingerprint on my mind. So when I am sharing high-contrast images like cartoons, simple computer graphics, or some memes, rather than share them as a JPEG and deal with lossy artifacting, I share them as a PNG.
"But you just said LossyPNG!"
Well, that's where the irony lies: PNG is, of course, lossless by design; this means that the image you get after decompressing the image is digitally identical to the image you fed into the compressor. But that doesn't mean you can't apply your own lossy image compression manually before you compress it. What I will usually do is lower the resolution a bit if needed, sometimes blur (or mosaic-pixellize) the background, and then reduce the number of colors in the image down to 16, 32, or 64 colors. This both has the effect of making PNGs lossless compression work much better (less data entropy), saving valuable space on the server (which is a resource shared among friends, rather than a part of a vast, global Large Scale Exploitation Engine's resource pool) and evoking the kind visuals you'd expect from the 16-bit era.

#ThisIsTheContentISignedUpFor - When I joined Twitter (RIP) in 2008, it had a "favorite" feature, where you could favorite tweets you liked. I quickly learned, however, that the favorite feature was more of a "like" feature, and there was no way to really save tweets for viewing later, because you likely favorited a dozen tweets a day. The Fediverse (and some other social networks) fixes this by having a separate feature for "liking" a toot, and for "saving" a toot for later viewing. But even among saved/bookmarked toots, I quickly get lost, because I'll save/bookmark something for later viewing, and forget about it later, and end up with dozens of saved toots.
I use #ThisIsTheContentISignedUpFor from time to time as a way of giving the person I'm replying to a kind of Fediverse "brownie point." However, I rediscovered it recently, and enjoyed reviewing the posts I had responded to with that hashtag — at least the ones still extant: disappearing toots are kind of a bummer, but totally a person's right.

#tooters - This isn't exactly a bespoke hashtag, but it doesn't get a lot of use (at least, not ever since an instance of the same name stopped spamming it for every single instance meta-toot). It's a fun tag to use when addressing the fediverse community at large, retaining the fun verb "toot" in favor of the rather clinical now-preferred verb, "post."

#tootlog - This is a hashtag that I exclusively use to publish an occasional log of my daily toot count. I'm the only one that does this (at least using this particular hashtag). Some of my "fedifriends" finds the practice rather bewildering, but I enjoy collecting and sharing data.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

#xkcdOTron / #xkcdOTronStrikesAgain - This is a tag and a nickname I created for my fedifriend Amin, who's mind is like a relational database of xkcd comics. He's very good at posting a relevant xkcd comic in the middle of a conversation, so I started calling him the "xkcd-O-tron"

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