Tags not federated on Mastodon

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1

Hi.

It seems that the hashtags I use on my blog posts are not federated on Fediverse (checked through mastodon). I have several posts with the same hashtags. I checked by two ways if the hashtags are federated.

  1. I searched for a specific hashtag I have used, only one post showed up.
  2. I am following the specific hashtags from another mastodon account. I made a new post including the specific hashtags. The post did not show up in my home timeline.

Any ideas?

2

Can you share the post, so we can see which hashtags aren’t getting federated? And is this on Write.as, or another WriteFreely instance? And are you using Mastodon or some other fediverse software to look up the hashtags?

Either way, as long as you’re publishing on a recent version of WriteFreely, hashtags should show up in the fediverse. We do everything we can on our end to make that happen.

3

Hi matt I have sent you a private message. If we find what causes the problem I shall share it here with everyone.

Thanks

4

I’ve seen this happen with anonymous posts, but I always figured that was by design, and it’s a good clue to me that I forgot to change where the post was supposed to end up.

5

Thanks @davepolaschek it seems that indeed this is the problem. If I first write the post as anonymous post and then move it to the blog, the hashtags do not get sent to mastodon.

So one could write his post on a simple notepad, and when ready, copy/paste it on the blog directly. But in that way you cannot have a preview.

So the workaround I did is to:

  1. Write as anonymous post and publish to get a preview of how it looks
  2. Copy the markdown of the anonymous post
  3. Paste in the desired blog as new post.

Of course in that way someone has to do some extra steps so hopefully @matt will take care of this and inform us.

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6

Yes, that matches what I see. It’s not been a huge deal for me, as I will generally make a new toot with a hand-selected image announcing a new post (or more likely a series of posts, since I appear to be pretty wordy), and only a few people follow my blog directly.

If fediverse comments to the blog were captured somehow, I would probably use a different workflow, but that’s still under discussion in a couple places and it sounds like @matt is still thinking about a solution.

7

That’s interesting. I always wondered whether tags were supposed to be federated, as I’ve always used anonymous posts as previews but never got any hashtags in the corresponding toots.

The bottom line is Write.as badly needs a full preview feature, not workarounds like publishing anonymous posts or copypasting. I’m all for minimalism, but previewing is an essential feature of any blogging platform. Especially one so good for technical writing like Write.as.

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