@Voline I really think of Mastodon's use of hashtags as being an expression of consent and agency, a proactive statement that "yes, I want this toot to be discoverable by people looking for this thing."

@Voline the longer I am here (which is admittedly not very long) the more of those little features I’m discovering. I really like it. Trying to survive on twitter was a nightmare. I had so many custom scripts written to isolate my account from trolls and harassers while allowing me to interact with people I cared about. It’s really noticeable that I don’t seem to need that here. It’s really lovely ❤️

@Voline thank you I had no idea. Love the concept

@Voline Super helpful. Thank you!

@Voline ohh that is awsome.. thank you for explaining that. :)

@Voline similarly I *really* like the fact that there is not count of how many "likes" a post has. this reduces the subliminal popularity contest of what post to look at into a very level playing field. Just read the post, then directly reply. it's not a dog-pile rugby match, it's a conversation! how refreshing...

@Voline Good to know!

That should encourage #hashtags in the way that weblogs encouraged #hyperlinks back in the day

@Voline this is helpful! Thanks for the explanation.

@Voline But why would you have a private conversation outside of DMs? And if users could still search #iguanas, couldn't an anti-iguana troll still troll the #iguanas hashtag?

@Voline I still need to figure out how this works for subtopics within a hashtag. I can see people giving stuff away on #fediGive, but there needs to be an extra way to look for one specific thing (I'm sure there is a workaround, I just don't know it).

I can search my own toots, though! That's a quality-of-life feature right there!

@Voline Thank you. I have been trying to find some of the community that I had on twitter in here and not having a ton of luck. I will just try random hashtags. #twittermigation

#Iguana #Zcurve #PublicationBias #SocialPsychology #Phacking #CFA #LatentVariables #ESM #Psychology #MetaScience #Personality #Statistics

@Voline it is nice to note that you can search for a simple term on toots that you've written, liked, were mentioned and so on... so if you want to recall an older toot you have interacted with, that will work!

@Voline Thank you!

@Voline thank you. That makes so much sense. ❤️

@Voline Interesting way of looking at it

@Voline Trolls usually stumble onto posts and just link to it. People are rarely harassed because of having 1 on 1 conversations, but when their posts gain traction across multiple communities.

It's a very specific function that only affects/stops like 2 people

@Voline thank you!

@Voline Subscribing to a hashtag feels meaningful. (Don't even know if we had this back in birdsite)

@Voline I had been wondering about this, but this makes a lot of sense. Thank you for the explanation.

@Voline I'm not suggesting this would happen, but if I put #iguanas in the private conversation I'm having, could someone search for that hashtag and then tell me iguana luvers suck? (ha I'm trying to understand the way it works and I feel like I'm missing something 😬)

@Voline Thank you 😁

@Voline You've now got me hoping the #iguanas meta starts picking up! Lizard bois! 🦎

@Voline omg I was a little annoyed about the search but didn’t even think about how it could be misused to harass those who love (iguanas) differently

@Voline still the trolls can just raid your hashtag, but of course they need to know it first, would that incentivize people to creat obscure hashtag for self/community protection?

@Voline does this mean we should more agressively tag things as well as CWing? 😊

#טיפים

@Voline your post clarifies and underscores the nature of #searching on Mastodon and explains the importance of using #hashtags. Thanks!

@Voline No sea lioning! Love it

@Voline @sinabhfuil this is the post I was remembering

@Voline Ah… thanks!

@Voline oh no now we’ve accidentally raided the iguanaverse! 😂

@Voline So I just tried searching for #archaeology #introduction and got zero results even though there are plenty of posts with both. Is there another way to combine searches I'm not aware of?

@Voline one thing I am trying to understand about mastodon is where is the like button?

@Voline I love this

@Voline Thank you! You reminded me of when users (us) came up with the hashtag idea on the birdsite as a way to crowdsource information. @shoq was the first person I know to introduce it. I also remember the first time I used it for Newsgathering with President Obama’s speech in Cairo. It provided a worldwide real-time reaction to the speech and added an original new element to CNN’s coverage!

@Voline is there a way to search the #Fediverse i.e. Federation feed for #hashtags?

@Voline Regarding the search function: I believe this is not entirely true and depends on the instance your on. Mine for example runs Elasticsearch which offers fulltext search. And I can actually find toots based on single words without hashtags.

That's Mastodon 3.5.3

@Voline Feeling this already. Accidentally replied with a hot-topic keyword & flinched expecting a flood of trolls, bros, & bots to block. Nothing but thoughtful response. So nice.

@Voline
Hadn’t realised this.

@Voline This is sensible, and I'm sure I recall a time when Twitter worked like this too. You could search for #Anonymous and it would bring up tweets about the hacktivist movement. Then at some point they changed it, so a search for that hashtag brought up random tweets using "anonymous" in other contexts, making the search useless. There must be other examples of this, like brand names that are also common words. Hashtagging is a deliberate act which should be reflected in search results.

@Voline Sorry if it's a dumb question, but why wouldn't the iguana trolls just search for #iguanas in the same way and drop their hate that way?

@Voline that's how I found this toot

@Voline Great to know... explains my initial search confusion now. HA!

@Voline
Huh. I wondered. I figured there was a reason Search works, or rather doesn't work, the way it does. Good to know. Thanks!

@Voline hey thanks a lot for that information! That makes a lot more sense. Bow I'm going to start using hashtags a bit more frequently I guess

@Voline

Thanks! As a total newb here, these tips and tricks are good to know!

@Voline - Why not have individuality instead of making it an alternative to #twitter Could well have much better & sophisticated features which outshine Twitter #twittermigration

@Voline really helpful, thank you

@Voline

Wow, that's smart! I went in (in 2019, I'm not new) thinking it was due to technical limitations and that it was more of an annoyance/tradeoff than anything else. Kudos for framing it another way.