Discussion
Friends, if you haven't already, it would be a big favour to me if you could enable tags.pub to boost your public tagged posts.
Just search for @_followback in your Mastodon UI. Click the follow button there. (Don't try to follow from the profile page; it doesn't work yet.)
It will follow you back, and when you make a post with a hashtag in it, the server will boost your post from the appropriate hashtag.
@evan @_followback Looks like the bot doesn't want to follow me back. I show up in "Followers" tab on its webpage, but it displays a wrong handle domain - maybe it has troubles with split-domain instances?
@dos
https://github.com/social-web-foundation/tags.pub/issues
Give me some details on your server setup!
@evan @_followback Looks like the bot doesn't work to follow me back. I show up in "Followers" tab on its webpage, but it displays a wrong handle domain - maybe it has troubles with split-domain instances?
@evan I read years ago that multi-word tags should be done in CamelCase, for the benefit of screenreaders. So when I take my posts, I'm careful to do so. It appears however that tags.pub lowercases all my tags.
I understand that it shouldn't create separate accounts for tags that vary only by capitalisation, but when creating a new account, why not preserve the capitalisation of the original tag?
@evan @_followback Evan, can I do this through my mastodon client app, Mona? I just tried & it workedβ¦
@evan Hi, I've filed an issue on tags.pub regarding RFC 9421 HTTP Message Signatures compatibility. tags.pub rejects Content-Digest headers with βNo digest provided,β which prevents Fedify 2.1+ servers from following tags.pub accounts.
@hongminhee so, the good news is that I can use the Fedify CLI to do an authorized fetch for an actor, and the debug output shows that RFC 9421 signatures worked. π₯³ The bad news is that the follow test still doesn't work. π«€ I'll keep trying and see what I can do.
@hongminhee awesome! Thanks for the detective work. I'll catch us right up.
Is this only for Mastodon? I tried to follow that account from Pixelfed but it cannot find it π€
@evan I'm reluctant to let a bot like this follow me, because it would also be able to see my followers only posts.
Now Evan, in this case you're my good buddy and you see those posts anyway; but I wouldn't want to leak them to a bot on principle. :)
What is *want* in an ideal world is the ability to distinguish types of subscriptions with access to subsets of my posts under my control, like the old Google+ Circles thing.
I see the network benefits of a bot like this for pushing public posts around to more servers, and I'd probably happily let it follow just my public posts.
(I trust *you* not to make an evil bot, but it won't always be you asking for these things, and even awesome people sometimes make security mistakes writing bots, or their tool gets taken over by someone else in the future that I might trust less.)
@brooke of course. And you're someone sophisticated enough to actually look at the code and see that it ignores non-public posts, but not everyone can do that.
Since you have your own instance, you could also use the relay interface. It only sends public posts. https://tags.pub/#connect has the details.
@brooke what did you end up doing?
@evan ok my decision is that i cannot accept using a follow-based bot like that on my main account with the current single level of follower trust that ActivityPub allows.
Whether I happen to trust the current operator of the bot or not, that's not a level of trust I'd generally allow.
If in the future there's a way to let a bot follow my public posts without giving it access to my followers-only posts, then I'd allow it.
Thanks for soliciting feedback.
@evan nothin' yet, i ain't in a rush ;)
@evan @_followback Seems like tags.pub automatically shares public tags, even without following. Followed anyway.
@sandwich on some servers, like mastodon.world, it's enabled by default. You can opt out by adding hashtag NoTagsPub to your bio.
@evan @_followback @joe Evan: how many people do you think you need to be a big enough sample?
And maybe reach out to each big servers admin to ask them to follow?
@tchambers @joe great idea!
I think it's a really interesting question of how much of the Fediverse needs to be providing data to tags.pub.
I think this might be an interesting network science problem. I'll do some math and let you know!
is there a detailed explainer on tags here and maybe search on the fedi too? it's the one argument I think the other place can make but I'm sure we can be better at it too.
@wjmaggos I'm not sure of your question. You mean, is there a document about how hashtags work on the Fediverse? And a similar document about how user and content search works on the Fediverse?
sorry, yes. what holds back our search functionality and what could be done (I didn't know lots of tagged posts don't come up when you click on them).
I love my experience except for the people that are not here, but I follow a lot of people (esp news outlets via the flipboard server).
@evan Does this service work on "quiet public" posts as well as "public" posts?
@dubious_dragon I think so.
But I think they shouldn't; I added a bug report here:
@dubious_dragon I fixed this a while ago. I should have mentioned it!
@evan @_followback It worked perfect. My obscure hashtag showed up @cogdogcooltech
@evan But here is a concern or maybe I am missing something. Every time I use a hashtag I get a boost notification from its account on tags.pub. This is excessive noise. It puts a burden on having to put a mute on each account?
@cogdog @evan yeah this makes Tags.pub totally not usable in its current form. I was gonna report about this situation too after enabling it for a few days. Now my boost count is completely off too so if I make a post that ends in 5 hashtags it makes it look like this is a more popular post then one that has 0 hashtags.
@ufal the followback account? I've had a couple of notes on that. Can you add more info here?
@evan @_followback One post, 3 tags, 3 responses from tags.pub!
OK, I have followed @_followback, so now the #Hashtags I use will be more widely distributed, to anyone who follows @Hashtags rather than just distributed those instances who happen to have someone who follows me.
And I have followed @bikenite so now I should be getting more #BikeNite messages, rather than just those that happen to come to my instance for other people on this instance.
@evan Question -- now that I'm following + being followed by the bot, I get a boost notification for each post with hashtags.
That's going to get annoying pretty quickly... is the intention for me to mute the bot after I follow it? Would that work OK, or does the bot ever need to e.g. private-mention me something I need to not miss?
@evan@cosocial.ca I followed but didn't get an accept or follow back, so I think there's something up on my end! The relay follow also didn't work so I'll need to take a closer look this week π
@julian OK. I use a separate key ID and actor ID for HTTP Signature, so that can throw off some implementations.
@julian I commented on the ticket! Looks like we can both make some changes to make this more robust. I'm going to push and test today.
@evan@cosocial.ca confirming that I am now able to follow the followback bot 
Still unable to establish the relay, however, so I opened a ticket on the SWF repo there.
Hey Evan.
Done! I posted a photo after following, and used two hashtags. Less than a minute later, I got notifications that it had been boosted, once per hashtag. Each boost was from an account corresponding to one hashtag I'd used.
That seems like the expected behaviour, but I figured I'd let you know what it did in case something seems amiss.
Cheers!
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