Simple Social Network

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1y ·
Public

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mstdn.social

The main controversy is accessibility barriers, as long lists of repetitive hashtags make life difficult for blind people who rely on screen readers to read posts out loud.

This issue can be reduced by putting all the hashtags in a list at the end of the post, with a "Hashtag list" warning before the list.

However, this still isn't perfect, and the current system of tagging has many other issues too.

I've tried to suggest a possible solution here:

➡️ https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/24445

(2/2)

frandroid 🏴‍☠️ jin jiyan azadî

@feditips
Love that proposal. I also think that CWs should be toggleable based on tags as well, and maybe even on pictures?

Bosque Bill :ve:

@feditips I think posts with photos would be much more readable if the hashtags appeared below the photo. May not be practical to change the formatting at this point, I understand.

Clay Disarray ✨

@feditips I think this is a good idea - thank you.

FediTips has moved!

p.s. Please don't harass artists who have relevant hashtag lists on the end of their posts. Many are low income people dependent on selling art, and need to use multiple variant tags simply to be seen at all.

Including relevant tags at the end of a post is not spamming, it's just the consequence of an exact-tag-only search system.

This isn't Twitter, there is no general search. The actual content of posts is invisible to people searching, so people have to use tags to make up for this.

Cragsand :verified:

@feditips
This looks like a great option for now but I can't help but think that allowing everything in posts to be searchable as an option would be a better approach. That would do away with hashtags altogether.

Some Mastodon instances have implemented a custom full text search feature like https://universeodon.com from https://github.com/VyrCossont/mastodon/pull/8 I've been using it lately and makes finding things that much easier.

I'm hoping to see adoption of a way to fulltext search being an instance option, opt-in and opt-out depending on the instance settings implemented by default soon.

For anyone curious this is being discussed in this GitHub thread: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/21627
#searching #mastodon #search #fulltextsearch #features #suggestions #mastodonsearch #mastodonsearching

Ricós

@feditips Boosting here and upvoting on GitHub because this would solve so many problems.

Michael Lysons

@feditips Nice idea 😀👍🏻

Bearmine

@feditips this was my first thought. Have tags as separate metadata outside of the post area. Keep hashtags for backwards compatibility. Allow combined searching of both.

FinchHaven

@feditips

Two thoughts, neither of which I should voice, since I'm not really heavily invested in the entire hashtag spamming issue

But:

1) Globally it seems either there's been a new outbreak of #Mastodon #Gatekeepers regarding #Hashtags

2) One instance (at mastodon dot art) is being trolled by persons unknown, who mastodon dot art has offended somehow

For instance 1) #Mute and #Block

For instance 2) mute block and #Report

Why people are so reluctant to block, I have no idea

DSBeans

@feditips even outside of accessibility concerns, I think doing this would help onboard new users into using tagging, making posts more discoverable overall.

@feditips

I'm somewhat disheartened every time I see suggestions to Mastodon that implicitly assume that Mastodon is the only renderer for Mastodon posts (by not distinguishing which part of the suggestion should affect the shape of Mastodon-created posts, and which should affect the way Mastodon displays posts--regardless of what software created them).

Sure, this can be untanged during discussion. However, the "fediverse is Mastodon" approach is quite common among its users and so I think that it behooves us to take most opportunities to phrase things in a way that combats that misconception.