If you want to follow Mastodon hashtags, you should just use Mastodon. It has the UX to support this, and all you'd end up by shoving this into lemmy is a lot of noise in a UI that's designed for replies to a single thread and not just hundreds and hundreds of threads.
The idea isn't to firehose mastodon into Lemmy. But to tighten the integration across the Fediverse. Yes, if a community subscribed to #Harris, it would be flooded, but if a community subscribes to #CityFarm it wouldn't grab many posts and would essentially enrich the community. It would be up to the moderators to decide what hashtag they're subscribing to.
You can create a tab : one where you see users you follow, another one where you see community. And in your setting, you can deactivate it, even block being followed by users.
So there won't be any noise. And when you click on hashtag, you can switch beetween : local, lemmyverse, fediverse user...and also limit the hashtag to the 10th most recent message.
So you won't have any noise. That something you can limit.
As long as it's something you can turn off and remove, that seems like a weird 'I want everything in one place' thing but not utterly destructive of the Lemmy experience.
It sounded more like stuffing a firehose into your Lemmy UI, at which point all you've really done is just make Lemmy a mastodon client, and I've already got several better options for that anyway.
The value of communities in Lemmy comes from the members of the community participating in them. The members choose material to present to their community with intent, with the desire to contribute to their community. The community then adds value by interacting with the presented material (even a negative response from the community adds value to the community by refining the community identity and interest).
Automatically pulling in material from non-community members destroys the value of the community. It pollutes the community space with material that no community member chose prior to its presentation.
Lots of people don't like those communities that are filled with bot posts. A lot of people even disable viewing of bot posts. Most of those bot posts have 0 comments.
I just don't think they're a good example to support your case.
I don't know what a toot is. Is that just a Fediverse tweet?
How would that impact moderation and rules? Ie, just because some random person tagged a post #politics doesn't mean it complies with the rules of that lemmy community.
I come here for links, not micro blog posts by random people.
I feel like it would be more interesting to be able to properly "crosspost" a toot into Lemmy.
When I'm on the twittoverse with my Sharkey account, I often encounter content that I want to share in Lemmy community. The only way to it for know is to create a new toot and have in it the link to the toot to share. That's not great.
Also, I often forgot to add the mention of the community when I wrote OC from Sharkey I cannot edit my toot to add the mention and see it post to Lemmy. I have to delete it and rewrite it from the start.
Not all parts of a topic belong in a community. For example, let's say I have a community about car mechanic advice. The relevant topics are probably #cars #auto_repair and #mechanics. However, #cars can also apply to new cars, deals on used cars, or the movie cars, none of which are directly relevant to auto repair. Likewise, #mechanics can apply to airplane mechanics or even video game mechanics. Trying to match communities to sets of hashtags is going to be noisy, so you'll get a lot of false positives and false negatives.
Likewise, not all individuals in a community are worth following, and individuals often post about different topics than the ones in a community. If you're interested in cars and I post about cars, you may want to follow me. But I may also post about cryptocurrencies and lawn care, and you may not care about those at all.
Trying to mix Reddit, Twitter, and Facebook style posts doesn't particularly work. It's better, IMO, to use services that do each of those well separately, and cross-post from one to another when you think it's relevant. Treat them as islands, and build bridges between them, don't try to mash them together into one SM soup.
The words in the middle are the key difference, though:
Communities are groups
Communities involve (i.e. are not) topics
Communities involve (i.e. are not) individuals
The social structure of Lemmy is fundamentally centred on groups, and that's what makes it distinct from other fediverse platforms, even if there is some interoperability
I use iceshrimp. I think lemmy is missing a lot from hashtag.
As i see :
Lemmy is not part of the fediverse but a lemmyverse. It lacks connection with other software and other software lacks connection to lemmy. I think we need to build a bridge between microblog and forum.
In the french fediverse community, our main base of users come from mastodon. And i would like to reach them.
I saw, in activitypub the ability to share and post whatever is your software. A complete freedom where you just need one account.
There is differents purpose, but i do think offering people both is good : microblog and forum. And i think the fediverse will slowly move toward that. With a UI for individual and other for community.
And hashtags do both :
It allows post to be discoverable by other apps in the fediverse.
It allows people to search and find any post of comment on a related topic.
So, Mastodon is working on a communities feature. I think having Mastodon and Lemmy communities have interop (along with great interop between the "same community" on two different instances) would be the superior option.
As an example, if someone posted or tooted the same link to several communities I'm following, I should be able to see all of the comments aggregated/tab between the community posts and responses. In other words, it should aggregate a view of all the different discussions about that link for all the communities I'm subscribed to and/or that my instance knows about.
Hashtags remind me of pound like on a telephone. So if someone say hashtag taylor swift I auto think pound taylor swift. And besides twitter or x or whatever has no place on here.
i think if lemmy is going to include micro-blogging, it should be differentiated and obvious. mixing into existing communities is just going to increase user confusion.
Some Lemmy compatible platforms do stuff like that
allow you to see both Lemmy style content and Microblog style content in the same platform
allow you to follow individual users.
include hashtags that federate out so the Lemmy posts appear under that hashtag for microblog users
Something like that could work, as long as it's an additional option and not a change to how communities currently work.
Mixing hashtags with communities sounds like a bad idea because of how much content would come in at once. For example, there are a few RSS feed communities and already those ones are overwhelming to keep up with. Most posts sit with no comments and 1 vote, which doesn't work for the vote & comment based way we organize content here.
We can improve how we federate these platforms together, but I prefer the tagging method. That way it's a conscious decision to post a microblog post in a community.
Also Lemmyverse wide agglomeration of communities should be the default view, the current balkanized Lemmyverse communities cause "big community syndrome" where the community unit becomes centralized again, negating most of Lemmy's benefits relative to reddit.
Agglomeration of communities could lead to some clash too.
Have a look at the [email protected] and [email protected] opinions on the Harris on Mastodon thing, having both groups discussing in one big place could get messy
If I were subscribed to both those places and saw posts from either of those places, it would make zero difference for which server they are. And the same goes for 99.99% of users. You have to be lost pretty far in the weeds to know the nuance and difference between the two.
I don't think clash is the right way to think about it. It's missing half the discussion to see just one. That's the problem.
And with the way things are, users will not double post to each, eventually one of the two will wither and die. For most communities, this situation of two communities will not even exist.