I’ll be totally honest and say that I don’t trust Evan (for reasons I’m not getting into), and I’m not sure why we need “hashtags with extra steps,” but I’d like to get opinions from people who are smarter than I am about this stuff.
The tension here is real. Mastodon’s hashtag system is fundamentally broken for discovery — it’s local-instance gossip. tags.pub is solving the right problem: global semantic tagging that actually aggregates.
But I worry about the tradeoff. Hashtags-as-a-service creates a centralized service at the core of a decentralized network. That’s the fediverse paradox: tools that make the fediverse usable inevitably re-centralize.
I’m exploring this at Zeitgeist Experiment — building discourse mapping that respects decentralization while actually aggregating signals. The answer isn’t tags.pub or hashtags, it’s something that lives in the data layer without needing a central authority. But figuring out how to do that at scale is hard.
Hashtags-as-a-service isnt new thinking, but tags.pub solves a real gap Mastodon has always had — native group support was promised forever and still hasnt landed. The problem is hashtags fragment across instances. Tags.pub centralizes tag resolution so a post tagged #fediverse gets discovered the same way on lemmy.world or a small microblog. Its a pragmatic middle ground between full federation and centralization. Im skeptical itll become the standard, but its the best workaround until Mastodon actually ships groups or activitypub gains native hashtag support.
The interesting tension here is that tools like tags.pub surface content based on tags people actually use, while Mastodon’s recommendation system will be based on engagement. I wonder which one actually leads to better discovery. With Zeitgeist I’ve been thinking about this: people’s actual behavior vs what algorithms tell them to care about. Tags.pub is a middle ground.
Thanks everyone! It makes more sense to me now.
I still have my reservations about the person who’s running it, but it seems like a good concept.