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...
Every hashtag on every post on every platform should ALWAYS be pascal case (a.k.a. camel case). I made this to illustrate how screenreaders read hashtags depending on whether they are lowercase or pascal case.
It’s a small thing that all of us can do to build a more inclusive, accessible internet for all. Please take the time to use pascal case.
Of all the criticisms out there about Mastodon, some deserved, some not, the most valid of them is the lack of search. It’s such a crappy decision and worse experience, with daily impact, I sometimes feel foolish defending the entire platform. That I have to still search the hellsite for news, after nearly a year here is inexcusable. And please don’t waste my time telling me about #hashtags. I’m aware. They were designed to be used within searches, not replace them.
If you are coming from Twitter, you understandably may feel like it is a lot quieter here. Mastodon is not "dead," but there is no #algorithm bombarding you with stuff. Here you develop your own user experience by searching out and following people and things that interest you. You can pretty quickly build a much more satisfying experience, but it takes a little effort. Following #hashtags is a good way to get started. Be patient and join in conversations.
Auch wenn #Mastodon keine algorithmische #Timeline hat, gibt es gute Möglichkeiten, die interessantesten/beliebtesten/besten(?) Beiträge darin leicht zu finden:
This looks really cool, can we have something like this for the #Fediverse/ #Mastodon? Like a bot posting the most used #Hashtags every 10 minutes in form of such a nice #wordcloud.
1: There's no algorithm to fill your Home feed for you. You must explore.
2: What are the feeds?
"Home" is who and what you explicitly follow
"This server" is everyone on your instance
"Other servers" is everyone followed by anyone on your instance.
3: #Hashtags are important here, and can be followed. To do so, search for one, then click the "add" icon in the search results bar.
4: Follow (and unfollow) with abandon! Follow people who boost a lot, that helps you find stuff. But you can also follow people and choose not to see their boosts, see first photo.
Browsing #hashtags is quickly becoming useless. Even important ones for #MastoAdmin like #Fediverse and #Mastodon are filled with toots of random #photos and #art. Some even promoting their #porn or #gamedev#gaming project. Even random #journal or #blog posts FILLED with random irrelevant hashtags. It's quite infuriating...if you know what I mean.🤦♂️😬
If you’re on toot.wales, you need to follow lots of people who aren’t - the Local feed here is pretty quiet, and some of us who do post a bit have our posts set to Unlisted so they don’t appear in the Local feed anyway (I did this when I noticed that 30% of the Local feed was me whittering on).
The Federated feed is fairly lively, and you can usually find interesting people to follow there.
And of course #hashtags are your friends. You can follow them as if they were regular accounts.
I've written an ActivityPub server which . That's all it does. It won't record favourites or reposts. There's no support for following other accounts or receiving replies. It cannot delete or update posts nor can it verify signatures. It doesn't have a database or any storage beyond flat files.
But it will happily send messages and allow itself to be followed.
This shows that it is totally possible to broadcast fully-featured ActivityPub messages to the Fediverse with minimal coding skills and modest resources.
I wanted to create a service a bit like FourSquare. For this, I needed an ActivityPub server which allows posting geotagged locations to the Fediverse.
I didn't want to install a fully-featured server with lots of complex parts. So I (foolishly) decided to write my own. I had a lot of trouble with HTTP Signatures. Because they are cursed and I cannot read documentation. But mostly the cursed thing.
Creating a minimum viable Mastodon instance can be done with half a dozen static files. That gets you an account that people can see. They can't follow it or receive any posts though.
I wanted to use PHP to build an interactive server. PHP is supported everywhere and is simple to deploy. Luckily, Robb Knight has written an excellent tutorial, so I ripped off his code and rewrote it for Symfony.
The structure is relatively straightforward.
/.well-known/webfinger is a static file which gives information about where to find details of the account.
/[username] is a static file which has the user's metadata, public key, and links to avatar images.
/following and /followers are also static files which say how many users are being followed / are following.
/posts/[GUID] a directory with JSON files saved to disk - each ones contains the published ActivityPub note.
/photos/ is a directory with any uploaded media in it.
/outbox is a list of all the posts which have been published.
/inbox is an external API endpoint. An ActivityPub server sends it a follow request, the endpoint then POSTs a cryptographically signed Accept message to the follower's inbox. The follower's inbox address is saved to disk.
/logs is a listing of all the messages received by the inbox.
/new is a password protected page which lets you write a message. This is then sent to...
/send is an internal API endpoint. It constructs an ActivityPub note, with attached location metadata, and POSTs it to each follower's inbox with a cryptographic signature.
That's it.
The front-end grabs my phone's geolocation and shows the 25 nearest places within 100 metres. One click and the page posts to the /send endpoint which then publishes a message saying I'm checked in. It is also possible to attach to the post a short message and a single photo with alt text.
There's no database. Posts are saved as JSON documents. Images are uploaded to a directory. It is single-user, so there is no account management.
I've raised an issue on Mastodon to see if they can support showing locations in posts. Hopefully, one day, they'll allow adding locations and then I can shut this down.
The code needs tidying up - it is very much a scratch-my-own-itch development. Probably riddled with bugs and security holes.
Just a tip for people here that want to make their posts more #accessible. Note this isn't a demand or even complaint, just a tip. I see some people putting #hashtags at the beginning, rather than the end, of their posts. While hashtags made part of a sentence works fine at least for me, having a string of keywords before the actual content means I, as a screen reader user, will likely not read. To get an idea of why, try reading a post that does this out loud to yourself. #ScreenReader
I have my feed set to English only. However, that appears to only apply to people I follow…? I follow a bunch of #hashtags and see those posts in all different languages.
Is there a way to restrict my feed to English only, regardless of whether it’s a person or a hashtag I follow?
Antennas.
Antennas are effectively custom timelines. They work approximately like watching hashtags, but they can look for normal text as well. You can add as many phrases as you like and the results can be filtered with an ignore list.
You can make an antenna that just shows posts from specific users and notifies you when they post something new, you can make an antenna that collects posts containing or excluding certain key words, or you can make an antenna that collects only posts with files attached. You can even make an antenna consisting of “Posts from specific users” with “Show replies” checked.
Setting up
You can set up antenna by going to the More! section on your sidebar, and selecting Antennas. Press Add + to create your first. This is where you can also manage & edit previously created antennas.
Images:
Where to find More! on the sidebar (highlighted)
Where to find Antennas in the More! menu (highlighted)
My antennas page showing Add + button and my previously created antennas.
4 & 5) When you click Add + you get this page to set up your antenna. I've set one up as my Calckey antenna and another to alert me when PastaThief posts. There's a lot to go through here. Expect a separate post sometime soon.
6 & 7) What those antenna feeds look like.
On our progressive web app you can access your antennas by selecting the UFO in the top right corner.
Clicking on the UFO button brings up all my antennas and the link to manage/edit them
Hey you, yes YOU, fediverse citizen. What are your community’s #hashtags? I want to hear all the weird, wonderful, niche and/or pun-ny tags from your corner of the fediverse.
My favourite of the week: #bloomscrolling – a punny, flowery alternative to doomscrolling.
A new #fediverse tool I've been working on (please be gentle on it!): hashtag.place! It is a simple way to follow #hashtags as bot accounts, useful for ActivityPub implementations that don't support native following of hashtags, and for smaller/self-hosted instances that may not see a lot of the tagged posts from larger instances.
It's pretty simple:
Pick a hashtag you want to follow (e.g., #running)
Replace the #-sign with an @-sign and search for that user on the hashtag.place server (e.g., @running)
Follow the bot account and it will every few minutes post new posts with that hashtag seen on larger instances!
(The bots will self-delete if they have 0 followers for a few days, so don't worry if you don't like it and unfollow).
Feedback welcome for my first foray into #ActivityPub development!
Should we be using hashtags and mentions more?
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...