Should we be using hashtags and mentions more?
effingjoe@kbin.social to /kbin meta@kbin.social – 1 points – 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.