Edited below. I imagine many of us are here from reddit, where hashtags weren’t really a thing and in many places mentions were actively discouraged (/r/politics I’m looking at you). However, since everything we post or comment on kbin (and lemmy) has the potential of getting federated on a mastodon server, which leans heavily on hashtags and mentions, should we be promoting the use of hashtags and mentions, in an effort to-- I dunno-- kind of tie everything together a little more neatly?
If the answer is “yeah, we probably should” then I’d also suggest that there be an option added to the settings to auto-populate the hashtags associated with the magazine to every post and another to add them to every top-level comment, very similar to how we have the option to auto-populate mentions for posts and comments.
Does this “Tags” field, when making a new thread/post, actually do anything with respect to this, or is that more for kbin-related stuff?
Oh, and, uh… #hashtags #kbin #fediverse
Feels weird to do that.
Edit: So, I did some brief testing, and have noted the following:
- Hashtags associated with the magazine are auto-populated at the end of the mastodon snippet.
- Hashtags added to the
tagsfield are likewise added to the end of the mastodon snippet. - Hashtags in the body text are seen as hashtags, but for reasons that might just be mastodon weirdness, searching for the hashtag doesn’t display the associated post.
- Hashtags in the body but more than ~350 characters into the body (i.e., past the point the snippet cuts it off) do not display.
Edit2: Mostly unrelated, but when I mention the “snippet” above, it seems like it is created by the first ~350 characters of the first paragraph. That is to say, if your first paragraph is 10 characters, then a blank line, then 100 more characters-- the snippet will only be 10 characters long.
yeah I think it would be good to do more. hashtags are clunky and an eyesore, and I would love to see better support of them that mitigates this. But currently they are the main way to signal discoverability on the fediverse. And posts on kbin are (usually) made with the intention that the public can interact with them.
One thing I would like to see is an extra field when you submit your post where you can add in some hashtags. These can be rendered as Tags in activitypub, which do exactly the same thing as hashtags, except that they are not visible in the main body of the text. The ActivityPub wordpress plugin also does this. I add tags to my posts on wordpress, and when you search for that hashtag, my wordpress blog post shows up, even though you’ll not find the hashtag anywhere in the body of the text.
kbin has this feature; I’m just not sure if it works like you describe. I need to play around more to do some testing, I guess.
Awesome! This approach seems quite functional and elegant. I don’t want to see hashtags, but having them exist invisibly (unless you click on something to show the hashtags for a post) would be great.
@PositiveNoise yes indeed you are exactly describing how kbin works now.
One thing I would like to see is an extra field when you submit your post where you can add in some hashtags […] except that they are not visible in the main body of the text […] search for that hashtag
I believe this is how things are supposed to work, but the hashtags aren’t as yet picked up by other platforms such as Mastodon. See https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/699
Please no, I really hate hashtag spam, especially when it becomes like Instagram. I want to read comments, not an attempt to game some attention.
I get that and from my testing, hashtags inside a post-body aren’t effective, so you’re safe there-- however, that being said, it is the main mechanism for discovering content on mastodon, which means it is somewhat necessary on that platform-- not just a way to “game” some attention.
Oddly though my lemmy account and mastodon account can’t see or interact with each other.
I think right now, kbin instances are better at federating with Mastodon than Lemmy.
Great question! I’m curious as well.
I followed my Lemmy profile from Mastodon yesterday and didn’t see anything. Just checked today and see my post without hashtags! Nice!
Yeah, but if I understand how Mastodon functions, you can only search for hashtags… so people that don’t follow you and weren’t looking at the federated “all” view when you posted will never be likely to find your post. I am pretty sure Mastodon leans a lot on the use of hashtags to function. I know that I only follow a few people but I follow several hashtags. I don’t know if this is a normal use, though.
@effingjoe So you pref topic-based Mastodon to people-based. I don’t know the percentages on that but it makes sense you’re active here on kbin.
@eddietrax I follow my Kbin profile from Mastodon, and I do see hashtags. Kbin has better integration with Mastodon, the microblog section on our instances picks up Mastodon posts that are tagged. Both Lemmy and Kbin posts, though, can be boosted from Mastodon and replied to from Mastodon.
But Mastodon is the biggest compared to others while others also got more growth https://fedidb.org/ . I use Misskey and it’s vastly different. It has it’s own MFM style and Markdown is off so there is also that. It has rss feed built in as widget so you can have rss of your magazine/Magazines and see what’s interesting. HEck you can even have rss of Kbin.social! https://kbin.social/rss?kbin So copy paste and answer to people!
Yes, #Hashtags are important. Without the hashtag #Fediverse, I wouldn’t have seen this post, for example.
I assume this is through Mastodon? I think you could’ve if you subscribed to the kbin meta magazine, but of course hashtags make things more visible for other platforms. On kbin you wouldn’t search too much through hashtags, but I think they also help with search indexing. My only issue with them is that they can often get abused quickly through hashtag spam, especially of particular viral topics, which might not even be related to whatever someone is posting.
I think you could’ve if you subscribed to the kbin meta magazine
I don’t think that’s how it works. Looking at the magazine from mastodon, I don’t see any posts nor boosts. It’s just empty. I doubt following the magazine from mastodon helps at all with discovering content on it.
kbin magazines seem to work like groups on Mastodon. Once you follow them, posts from them will start appearing in your timeline.
Oh, I see, wasn’t aware that’s a thing. Is it normal for group profiles to not show any posts (since that’s the case with /kbin meta at least) directly?
Yeah, they look empty before subscribing, after which new posts should be displayed.
@LollerCorleone @effingjoe @montag @DarkThoughts @Pamasich
Huh the one I follow still wont refresh. Case in point https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]. Lemmy does self boost from magazine so I can see why you would see, but kbin does not do that…
It looks like my post shows up on mastodon as a link to this post with the first 350 or so characters shown, as well as (only) the first two hashtags. (#fediverse is not shown on the post on Mastodon).
I think federation is still a bit janky, but I’m over here because KBin integrates better with Mastodon. I think we absolutely should use hashtags.
Mentions I’m still working out. It does make sense if we’re responding to posts from MAstodon, and it’s automatically populated now so I guess @ernest wants to encourage it?
As someone who has never used Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon, Tumblr or Facebook. How does hashtag work?
It’s a keyword search. On Twitter, it was used to help people more easily find specific topics of discussion, and on mastodon, there is no plain text search-- you can find people, or hashtags-- so if you want your post to be discoverable outside people that already follow you, you need to use hashtags.
So how do you know what the hashtag people use is? Like how do you know it’s # with totk, tearsofthekingdom, ZeldaTotk, TotKcontraption, TotKvehicle, TotKvehicles, TotK_vehicle or something else? Or what new hashtags are there?
You don’t; that’s why people will generally use multiple like you listed. So you’d just put them all in
It’s not quite so formal as that, but many people seem to use several common hashtags when it’s ambiguous like that. So in your instance, if you were talking about the new zelda game, you might tag the post with all of those hashtags just to spread a wider net for interested people.