meta, on boosting, for new fedis
@jonny Don't forget hashtags. People write something beautiful and have important conversations and threads... and then there's no #.
Does my head in.
And replies are good too. An active conversation brings people in.
I really should look up how to make a group...
@Homebrewandhacking @jonny I’ve seen groups and tried to look them up but I’m not sure I understand them. How do they work and what’s the idea? Are they a base-#Mastodon feature?
@Homebrewandhacking @maegul oh! hark! https://a.gup.pe/
Make a group by tagging a @newgroup and then people can follow that handle. every time you mention it that post will be boosted to the group
@jonny @Homebrewandhacking @newgroup Right! Thanks! So it's not base-#Mastodon or ActivityPub but a server/app some people (you too @jonny ?) have made on top of AP. Very nice! Hope someone's server doesn't get overrun!
Maybe there should be a "whatisagroup" group to get onboard people??
Otherwise, they seem pretty popular ... almost like topic threading is useful! I was thinking some feature like this would nice, partly inspired by some of your thoughts on tools for academic discussion.
@jonny @Homebrewandhacking @newgroup Hmmm, as someone smarter than me responded when I explained groups to them ... "so it's like following a hashtag?"
So I'd guess their development predates the relatively new hashtag following...?
Is there actually any functional difference from current hashtags?
@maegul @Homebrewandhacking yes- following a hashtag means that all posts that your server receives that have that hashtag are added to your feed. Someone using a hashtag that no one on your server follows will not be added to your feed.
The guppe group boosts everything that mentions it. if you are following the group, then all posts that mention to bot will be added to your feed even if no one on your instance follows the person who posted it.
@jonny @Homebrewandhacking Ahh thanks! Didn’t think about the instance visibility factor.
Across smaller and more niche instances, some of which I imagine (?) are more inclined to leverage hashtags and groups and similar mechanisms to connect across the network, cutting through instance visibility to get actual subscription like behaviour is probably quite valuable. Cool!
@maegul @Homebrewandhacking yeah totally. it basically becomes the most important factor for discovery and communication for smaller instances - whether or not you can actually see anything. that's why some use relays basically to grab all posts from larger servers, and I'm working on stuff to do more proactive exploration beyond the pub/sub model like grabbing extra replies to posts, sharing local timelines, etc.
@jonny @maegul @Homebrewandhacking
Thanks for all these explanations. I didn’t realize hashtags were also limited to whether the post is “visible” by your server - but that makes sense and explains why some of them seem relatively unpopulated!
@elduvelle @maegul @Homebrewandhacking I think it would be really nice to do the same thing as I'm thinking with replies: when you search for a hashtag, go out and find more posts from other servers using that hashtag. the problem is "which servers" because even our instance knows about thousands.
Masto stores some notion of trending tags for both accounts and instances, which could be one way of doing it: go and grab posts from the top-n instances using the tag. or maybe even give a box to someone like "here are the servers you interact with the most and how many uses of this tag they have, select which we should go fetch"
it seems fine to me from a privacy POV because the act of using a hashtag is to make a post be discoverable, and followers only posts wouldn't show up in the search.
@jonny @elduvelle @maegul I am trying to help out someone who is interested in news in Africa but nothing comes up on the hashtags.
This would be explained by # not being followed on either server.
So I guess... make speculative groups as a sort of beacon and see if someone bites?
@Homebrewandhacking @elduvelle @maegul I would probably ask for a boost on a post with the hashtags so other people following them can find you, and then go searching on large instances and follow as many ppl as seem reasonable that are using them to get their posts in the future, boost them and check their boosts for other ppl, rinse, repeat, explore, add, unfollow later if u don't like what they're posting.
in that way following is also a little different here: by following someone you are "bringing them to your server" so other ppl can see them eg. when following hashtags as well.