The #KISS path is to simply bridge them all and let them cooperate, as they are all a part of the #openweb family.
The more complex and messy path is that some of them might not want to do this... OK now we get to the part where piss is likely signal rather than noise. Let's draw a line, (a date is good) if they don't bridge, we let loose the pee, liquid trickling in will short out their servers.
The #KISS principle (keep it simple, stupid) suggests that the simplest solution is often the best, and in this case, bridging these different decentralized platforms may be the best approach. However, it's possible that some of these platforms may not want to cooperate, in which case there may be some conflict.
@u0421793 you can go into your admin and change your template to make hashtags easer to see - they are a core part of the #openweb, so this is important for you to feel at home :)
It doesn’t address any of the significant aspects of hashtags, which are:
They’re presented in a bad colour (yours aren’t, yours are the same colour as body copy, which is good, thanks)
From a typographic point of view, they’re ugly, because they have a hash character ahead of each one, which is not only jangly and noisy but more importantly, it can’t be pronounced at all, it isn’t spoken as a sound, and really isn’t content and therefore shouldn’t be there
It’d be better if it were simply the word, presented in the same styling as the body copy
But, you (and the early architects of pre-web hypertext and therefore influencing the SGML days of formulating the web) want to indicate the presence of a hyperlink somehow, and the thing chosen was an underline
In typography we don’t ever underline – it’s ugly, it’s bad taste, it’s not good design, choosing an underline was a terrible choice, from a basic visual context, and also a question of taste and style
Yours (while maintaining the body copy colour) have an unspoken non-content hash character (the octothorpe) and also an underline just to make sure people know it’s an intrusive affordance
We really need to solve the issue of hypertext affordances within body copy, whilst also having some semblance of style and class and good taste
One way would be to make every single word a hypertext link but this isn’t suitable, more often you’d want to hyperlink a group of words, not a single word
Hovering is no use in this day, this iPad has no way to hover
So how does a designer or typographer set body copy so that it both looks good, and performs the additional functions of hypermedia?
I don’t know, but hashtags and underlined links aren’t it, and changing the colour of either of those to something totally unreadable (all the hashtags on here are an accessibility violation, I simply cannot read them against the background, and that’s how it’s presented to me – as an accessibility disaster)
One possible solution is to repurpose the bold and italic – mainly the italic
People these days don’t use italics for what they’re traditionally used for, italicising could perfectly well indicate hyperlinks
If I had a Time Machine I’d go back to the early days of hypermedia, Xerox expanding the ideas of Vannevar Bush, and tell them that although bitmap font italics are shit now, wait until the early 2000s and they’ll look a lot better – use those as links
Interestingly, most of the things you talk about are defined by "templates" rather than hardcoded, so the best aproch is talking to template creators or trying to find better templates if they exist then promoting them.
You will likely need to push a bit at culture and history as well.
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