I have just deployed a script and a mastodon bot which attempt to hashtag lemmy posts so that they are better discoverable in microblogging services.
Please check the README for the why and the how.
If you have a microblogging account, please consider following the bot account which will help its hashtags federate to your instance’s public timeline.
Many thanks to @jgrim@discuss.online for hosting the bot.
PS: If you have a mastodon account, you can reply to your posts on mastodon (just search for their url) and add hashtags to your replies. This will achieve a quick and dirty version of what this bot is doing
There are countless feature requests for Lemmy, but we are only two fulltime devs. Our time is limited so we have to set some priorities, and no matter what we do, some people will always disagree with those priorities. And besides implementing new features we also have many other tasks like reviewing pull requests, or right now bug fixing to get already implemented changes out into production. The only way to implement more features faster is by having more developers. Either as volunteers, or by hiring people with donation money.
I understand all that and am not criticizing the pace of lemmy development. My frustration is that in the past, you’ve said hashtags don’t make sense for lemmy because communities are the organizational method. Even in your other comment to the OP in this thread, you said
But federated hashtags already work across the fediverse. Implementation details are basically settled. I don’t know what you mean by post tags, but any other feature that uses a tag-like mechanism would have to work well alongside the currently standard way of using hashtags in order for lemmy’s hashtags to remain interoperable with the fediverse.
It seems that you don’t personally care about federated hashtags and so this feature will probably remain at the bottom of the priority list and that’s what we’re lamenting about in this thread. Federated hashtags would increase interoperability with the rest of the fediverse and would improve the overall experience so its a bummer that yall don’t see that.
Well there are some different ideas for implementing hashtags. One idea was that Lemmy could follow hashtags from Mastodon etc to display them in the corresponding community. The only way to receive these hashtag posts is by following the users who create them, but Lemmy doesnt support user following.
Another option would be that Lemmy adds hashtags to posts so that they are picked up by Mastodon etc, without Lemmy itself using hashtags. This is definitely doable, for example it would be very easy to automatically add hashtags based on the community name, so everything in /c/memes would have #memes hashtag. It would also be possible to configure the hashtags in community settings similar to this tagginator tool, but that would require more extensive changes.
A third option would be to add hashtags based on post tags, thats what db0 was discussing before and which I referenced with that comment. However we are still discussing how post tags should work as you can see from the issue and from the RFC.
So option two or three seem reasonable, but like you say none of the maintainers seem to give this much priority. So the only way this will get implemented is if someone else writes the code. Thats just the reality, complaining wont change anything.
I want to be able to add hashtags when I create a post, either through a field (like
title,body, etc) or directly in the body of my post like everywhere else on the #fediverse. This doesn’t require any extra moderation, its compatible with the rest of the fediverse, and would increase discoverability.I was venting a frustration with a fellow user, which is perfectly reasonable. And clearly, there’s a chance it could change something, because it got your attention and made you jump in.