I’ll be totally honest and say that I don’t trust Evan (for reasons I’m not getting into), and I’m not sure why we need “hashtags with extra steps,” but I’d like to get opinions from people who are smarter than I am about this stuff.
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I think it is a useful service, because it helps small instances discover content. However, this idea is not new and another service of that kind, FediBuzz, has been operating for a long time.
Hashtags-as-a-service isnt new thinking, but tags.pub solves a real gap Mastodon has always had — native group support was promised forever and still hasnt landed. The problem is hashtags fragment across instances. Tags.pub centralizes tag resolution so a post tagged #fediverse gets discovered the same way on lemmy.world or a small microblog. Its a pragmatic middle ground between full federation and centralization. Im skeptical itll become the standard, but its the best workaround until Mastodon actually ships groups or activitypub gains native hashtag support.
This is an attempt to work around the lack of support for groups in Mastodon.
Anyone who wants tags.pub to be a thing should just use the threadiverse instead.
It’s quite easy to flip this around: forcing topical discussion through groups are just a workaround for lack of proper discovery and aggregated search…
To give you one simple example: I get a lot more useful and meaningful interactions from following #emacs on mastodon than by waiting for people to find out and post to !emacs@programming.dev. Same thing for #nfl and !nfl@nfl.community or !nfl@a.gup.pe, etc.
