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
FYI I did some testing regarding this topic and edited my post with the results, if you’re interested.
@[email protected] @effingjoe Like here I am replying to my #Kbin account with my #Mastodon account. The replies and threads appear as posts and replies on mastodon, and magazines can be followed like people.
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.
Indeed, hence I think kbin is the best sorta in-between. It’s designed to deal with both threads and microblogs.
I found mine easily enough. You searched with the full name
username@domain.tdl?I have. The name will come up, but no results will show. Also looking at this thread from lemmy, I will see my kbin account, but not the reply from my mastodon account.
Weird, because I can see all your activity on your mastodon account.
When you create a new thread (in Kbin), you can apply tags to it before posting.
Are these tags doing the same thing as hashtags, or are they more like the ones in Reddit?I don’t think these populate out to the greater #fediverse.
The hashtags in the comments link to the same page as the one of the thread, so I would think they share the same function for the rest of the fediverse.
No idea about Reddit though. Sounds like a redesign thing which I didn’t use anyway.
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 believe that anything submitted to a magazine basically has an automatic hashtag for that magazine’s name, which is then searchable on Mastodon.
Afaik you can sub to them like you’d do to a user. Not entirely sure though as I don’t really use Twitter like social media.
That’s pretty neat; I didn’t realize that.
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…
That works for Lemmy, but with kbin you need to follow a magazine’s hashtags.
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.
I’ve been managing magazines and have tags enabled. However, the microblogs section does not reliably populate posts. I find it pretty weird because if I search for posts with the tag, I can find plenty. Anyone have any ideas why this is happening and how I can fix 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.
Several ways. Obviously you can simply check the popularity of certain hashtags yourself by searching them. Secondly, theres also hashtag suggestions, so if i were to write “#tot” and #totkcontraption is the first one, its probably the most popular one. Lastly, you just use 2-3 hashtags. So #totk #tearsofthekingdom #totkvehicles for example.
Its not a perfect system that will sort every post perfectly, but its an open and flexible system.
There’s no database, you’d just search
#totkand find things tagged with that.
Hashtags are basically tags, if put a # before a word, the post, it’ll create a link to that tag and I’ll be easy to find similar content.
So for example if I use #bunny and you tap the link, all content with that hashtag will be displayed.
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?
It’s a setting you can turn on/off. I forget what the default is. Off, I think.
Oh, cool. Thanks.
I will probably turn that off, but keep using hashtags here and there so I can talk to people on Mastodon.
Correct, default is Off for threads and On for “mastodon” like posts.
@effingjoe I use them in my posts. I read somewhere that it makes it easier to find on Mastodon. However, if I look at at the overall activity on my posts, engagement seems to come primarily from the “threadiverse” (various kbin, lemmy, shtjustworks, ect. instances) I see some activity from Mastodon, just not as must as the other federated instances.
I think I’m going to start using them, myself, either way. I’m more concerned about using the mentions in comments. I’m not sure it’s considerate to notify every person in a comment chain just because I respond to the last person in the chain-- but I am willing to be convinced that this wouldn’t be considered spam and is actually desireable.
What happens with magazines that don’t have tags set, like kbinMeta? It seems that kbin people can select a magazine when they make a new post but (I don’t have a Mastodon account) do people from Mastodon have some way to make their post show up in kbinMeta’s microblog section or follow kbinMeta’s thread/microblog contents?
The hashtags for the magazine control what shows up in the microblog section of the magazine. So I guess without that no one can make their content show in the microblog?
The autopopulate would have to be optional for the magazine, though.
I have started using hashtags so we get microblogs in @worldwithoutus
While it’s a start, I realized many of the hashtags are too broad for a news sub - someone posting news from, say, Thailand, is not likely to use the hashtag #Asia. So I was thinking about adding country specific tags.
That will be a lot of hashtags, and if it prepopulates submissions it will make the magazine un-useable.
So long as there is an option for users to hide them when reading…
Probably also best if they’re added optionally via a separate box, rather than included in the main body. Down the road, it would be cool if that box could be used to find suggestions (so the writer can find any already in use which fit).
They can have a lot of utility for those who like them when used judiciously & sparingly, but too many people seem to have a bit of a tagspam habit.
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!
