@m @jupiter_rowland Hey I just want to find other people who share my weird hobbies and interests - and mastodon makes that next to impossible unless said interest is something with several really large instances devoted entirely to it.
@jupiter_rowland That's all well and good, but if I search for a hashtag, I will still only see posts with that, by people on my server or that my server knows - that does not make discoverability easy.
@Quentin @jupiter_rowland
Your server should know every other server in the Fediverse, so that is a lot of servers you are searching for a #tag
(I am pro discoverability BTW)
@MrLee @jupiter_rowland That would be great, except that's not how it works. If I search for a hashtag using my personal account, I get a completely different set of results to if I log in to my work account and search for the same hashtag. Searching only returns results from people you follow, or people others on your instance follows. That's why I'm saying discoverability is so hard. There might be a whole instance out there with thousands of users dedicated to a particular hashtag - but unless I already know about them, or someone else on my instance follows them, I'll never find them.
@jupiter_rowland
Hey Juipter
I'm absolutely not the expert on this. I've been asking lots of questions and finding my way.
How Fediverse Servers find each other is something I've been trying to learn. They obviously do, but how quickly and how successfully remains a mystery to me. I plan to install Activity Pub, WordPress plugin, and I am most curious to how people here on Mastodon will find my #tags.
@MrLee @jupiter_rowland It takes two things. Boosts and hashtags.
The boosts will get your posts into the timelines of whoever follows the person boosting your initial WP post. It also gets it into the Federated timeline of the instances all those followers are on.
@MrLee @jupiter_rowland It’s possible (but unlikely) that someone will stumble across the post by browsing the federated timeline, but on most instances that’s just too noisy and is ignored.
Hashtags act as a filter, searching through the federated timeline (they can only match posts that have already made it to your instance through other means - boosting).
@MrLee @jupiter_rowland So you want to get your post boosted by someone well connected with followers on lots of different instances and have a strong hashtag game.
@MrLee @jupiter_rowland For simplicity, I’ve ignored relays. They may help your post propagate, but won’t actually get it in front of anyone’s face. It will help people searching for the webfinger address of your blog as their instance may at least have heard of it and cached it.
@MetalSamurai
If you're subscribing a #hashtag and your server sees a tagged post through a #relay, it will land in your #feed.
@jupiter_rowland Ok I'm going to give up on this, clearly it's only encountering hostility. I don't really understand why, given the entire web is built on the idea of separate servers working on agreed protocols and with established ways of finding each other. If I create a new website today, sure you might not be able to find it immediately, but by next week, DNS servers and web crawlers will have done their thing and you could use any major search engine to find it if you put in the same keywords I've used. Clearly there is resistance in the fediverse to this well entrenched idea and people only want to find others they already know. I just need to get my head around that. I'm not intricately familiar with how the fediverse works under the hood and I've never setup an instance. I'm just looking at this from the point of view of a user who would like to be able to find people who post things with the same hashtags I do -ESPECIALLY users I don't already know - which I thought was the idea of hashtags in the first place.... Anyway, I'm happy to drop this now, I really didn't intend to start an argument...