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Comment by defulmere | Hacker News Reader

> Also Discovery is a huge problem: how do I discover people I know? How do content creators who want to build an audience (and so create content that would attract users to the platform) get discovered?

Hashtags play a huge role on Mastodon - discover people by following hashtags and include hashtags in your posts so that people can discover you.

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> Hashtags play a huge role on Mastodon - discover people by following hashtags

I'm probably twiddling the wrong buttons or something but whenever I've clicked on a Fediverse hashtag, it's always just been the hashtag on the originating server. Is there a way to get a wider view that I've missed?

"The original server" should also show relevant posts from other servers, unless they are blacklisted.

Huh, looks like I've just been exceedingly unlucky in the hashtags I've been clicking on. Thanks!

Need to have people on your home node following people on the other node for your own node to be aware. Really unfriendly to small nodes / people who run their own personal nodes.

You can always click out to the same hashtag on other instances. It's a network graph. There's no one "perfect" view of a hashtag, but there are a lot of interesting sub-views of one if you've got time to click around.

The idea is to have a view built by the connections people on your instance make. The view from tech.lgbt is different from the view from photog.social, and that's a feature. Smaller nodes can subscribe to relays if they find it too limiting.

> The idea is to have a view built by the connections people on your instance make. The view from tech.lgbt is different from the view from photog.social, and that's a feature.

I looked at: a) https://mstdn.social/tags/opensource b) https://tech.lgbt/tags/opensource c) https://photog.social/tags/opensource

They look completely identical, the feature isn't working.

I'm sceptical it's even an intended feature as much as just the overall result of the protocol design not putting too much thought into it.

> Smaller nodes can subscribe to relays if they find it too limiting.

I looked into it, that's actually a better solution than the old one I was aware of which involved a bot account automatically subscribing to different accounts across the fediverse. It's my understanding that needs to be explicitly configured by a Mastodon administrator for a subscription though, out of the hands of the user.

This still isn't particularly user friendly and I still think this is a terrible user experience, particularly when comments like these appear:

>>>> Hashtags play a huge role on Mastodon - discover people by following hashtags

>>> I'm probably twiddling the wrong buttons or something but whenever I've clicked on a Fediverse hashtag, it's always just been the hashtag on the originating server. Is there a way to get a wider view that I've missed?

They were just two random examples. As a server's connections build, it'll inevitably reach a point where it sees most/all of the network and it's no longer distinguishable.

If I look at [1] whilst logged in to that instance, I do get a slightly different (first couple of pages have a few more posts, then it starts diverging) view than from [2] where I am not logged in. Also slight difference from [3] in that posts from, e.g., @infosec_jobs@mastodon.social are not there but are in [1] and [2].

[1] https://octodon.social/tags/opensource

[2] https://tech.lgbt/tags/opensource

[3] https://photog.social/tags/opensource

I don't think the hashtags are a great experience. Common hashtags get overloaded with junk, how do you know which hashtags to use, you need to register with some external service (and find out about it) like fediverse.info which I've found to be a pretty clunky experience. These are the kind of ergonomic wrinkles I was thinking about.

You use the hashtags that match your interests, eg I wanted more Python content in my timeline so I typed #python into the search box at mastodon.online and followed the tag. I didn't need to use an external site for this, just the Mastodon site.

Now I'm seeing posts from people discussing Python stuff which gives me a pool of people to choose to follow. Now that I've got some people populating my timeline I can unfollow the tag if I decide it gets too noisy.

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