Edited below. I imagine many of us are here from reddit, where hashtags weren't really a thing and in many places mentions were actively discouraged (/r/politics I'm looking at you). However, since everything we post or comment on kbin (and lemmy) has the potential of getting federated on a mastodon server, which leans heavily on hashtags and mentions, should we be promoting the use of hashtags and mentions, in an effort to-- I dunno-- kind of tie everything together a little more neatly?
If the answer is "yeah, we probably should" then I'd also suggest that there be an option added to the settings to auto-populate the hashtags associated with the magazine to every post and another to add them to every top-level comment, very similar to how we have the option to auto-populate mentions for posts and comments.
Does this "Tags" field, when making a new thread/post, actually do anything with respect to this, or is that more for kbin-related stuff?
Edit: So, I did some brief testing, and have noted the following:
Hashtags associated with the magazine are auto-populated at the end of the mastodon snippet.
Hashtags added to the tags field are likewise added to the end of the mastodon snippet.
Hashtags in the body text are seen as hashtags, but for reasons that might just be mastodon weirdness, searching for the hashtag doesn't display the associated post.
Hashtags in the body but more than ~350 characters into the body (i.e., past the point the snippet cuts it off) do not display.
Edit2: Mostly unrelated, but when I mention the "snippet" above, it seems like it is created by the first ~350 characters of the first paragraph. That is to say, if your first paragraph is 10 characters, then a blank line, then 100 more characters-- the snippet will only be 10 characters long.
Yeah, but if I understand how Mastodon functions, you can only search for hashtags.. so people that don't follow you and weren't looking at the federated "all" view when you posted will never be likely to find your post. I am pretty sure Mastodon leans a lot on the use of hashtags to function. I know that I only follow a few people but I follow several hashtags. I don't know if this is a normal use, though.
@effingjoe So you pref topic-based Mastodon to people-based. I don't know the percentages on that but it makes sense you're active here on kbin.
@eddietrax I follow my Kbin profile from Mastodon, and I do see hashtags. Kbin has better integration with Mastodon, the microblog section on our instances picks up Mastodon posts that are tagged. Both Lemmy and Kbin posts, though, can be boosted from Mastodon and replied to from Mastodon.
But Mastodon is the biggest compared to others while others also got more growth https://fedidb.org/ . I use Misskey and it's vastly different. It has it's own MFM style and Markdown is off so there is also that. It has rss feed built in as widget so you can have rss of your magazine/Magazines and see what's interesting. HEck you can even have rss of Kbin.social! https://kbin.social/rss?kbin So copy paste and answer to people!