(Not so much a tip but a plea...)
If you want to be able to follow hashtags in Mastodon, please put a thumbs up on the following issue:
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/1096
If you're a developer, maybe you could contribute to the code to make this possible?
Following hashtags would be really useful for discovering new people to follow. New people would find interesting content more easily too. It would help Mastodon and the Fediverse grow 🌱 👍
@feditips A sub-problem of this hashtag following one is the way Mastodon shares toots as they are pushed individually to followers. For hashtags to work under this model, a server would need to know who to send hashtagged posts to, so in effect each hashtag starts to become an account but one that gets followed per server. Hashtags really need a gossip network and that requires scalable moderation. Lots of interesting problems to solve for this one.
@weex@c4.social @feditips@mstdn.social @schmittlauch@toot.matereal.eu already made a concept for this(see his pinned post)
@farshidhakimy @feditips Yeah, it's always the same long standing issues coming up.
So @weex, you're proposing gossiping. My idea relies on DHTs instead, but I'm always happy about other approaches as well as this problem isn't trivial to solve.
I am not that familiar with gossiping, some of the apparent problems I had with that approach are to many intermediate nodes as possible censors, possible load balancing issues, and no access to posts before the start of subscription. Also I am not
->
@schmittlauch @farshidhakimy @feditips Excellent! Thanks for the link. I've been collecting materials on gossip and moderation which is why I looked into how message propagate in the first place. Will add it to the library and comment once I've checked it out.
@weex @farshidhakimy @feditips There are a few errata (e.g. in the load balancing algorithm) and a few slight architecture changes in the DHT since then, but unless you're planning to implement or simulate stuff it's still fine.