ALERT
Gargron is writing a Mastodon feature:
"Change hashtags at the end of the post to not be rendered"
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/26260
That seems like a pretty big change. I've got questions, like:
- Why not put them under a "show tags" thing?
- On Tumblr they're visible, but they show you the first line or so by default and then you can click to show the rest. Should we have that?
- At the moment, when something appears in your Home feed because you follow a hashtag, there is no indication about why. If hashtags are hidden, people are going to be even more confused.
I get that people want to not see spammy hashtags at the end of posts, but to make them totally hidden to the reader seems a bit extreme?
Anyway, if you feel similarly, leave a comment on the Github pull request: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/26260 (You might need to make a Github account, but that's pretty easy.)
@woozle ha, I saw that comment from woozalia and thought to myself "hmm I wonder ..." and sure enough it was indeed you.
I made a comment as well:
"As others have pointed out, this seems like it will have a lot of problematic consequences.
What problem is this trying to address, and is there a different way to address it?"
@jdp23 @woozle @cassolotl going to drop in to say that “out‐of‐body hashtags” were an old monsterfork (<https://web.archive.org/web/20190115135415/https://monsterpit.net/about>) feature that were requested and generally liked by the community.
they were implemented and federated basically exactly like this (hashtags at the end of the post were not included in the post contents; on remote servers the post would appear in the hashtag timeline but would not be visible in the post.) i didn’t spend enough time on monsterpit to remember how they worked on monsterpit itself—@aescling do you recall?
anyway @cassolotl you explicitly requested this feature in 2018, just fyi https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/7250
@Lady @jdp23 @woozle @cassolotl actually, the way monsterpit did out of body tags was with the bangtags system; i think hashtags actually in the body were still always rendered
@aescling @jdp23 @woozle @cassolotl i’m preeetty sure it also did “the last hashtags if they are all on a line” but i could be confusing it with a different implementation
anyway my point is just that this isn’t out of nowhere; it’s something people have been talking about for at least five years
at the time of all of those conversations though, following hashtags wasn’t a thing, so it was clear from a post being in a hashtag timeline that it was tagged with that thing even if it wasn’t rendered in the post
i do agree with the comments that now that you can follow hashtags that complicates things, and this feels a little half‐baked