Mastodon has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of Twitter’s ongoing downfall, and since I started using it seriously late last year, it’s caught on. While I still use Twitter to monitor the news and talk to the occasional source, Mastodon is my new home for short posting. But Mastodon has one significant problem: It’s a big problem Annoying to find things I like.
I’m not talking about “discoverability” in the sense of some custom suggestion algorithm. I mean, by design, the information on many Mastodon servers is relatively sparse and vague. Back on Twitter, I kept open several columns of search terms—some for serious topics I was covering, some for personal interests like my favorite games, all a potential gateway to an interesting new corner of the service. Mastodon deliberately does not allow plain text searching, and despite some attempts to devise a selection system for it, the main alternative so far is hashtags.
Mastodon allows you to search for ticks or keep columns open to track them. In addition to basic topic titles like #politics or #music, people write posts with tags like #LawFedi or #lawstodon for legal publications, #introduction for people who join the service, or #CatsOfMastodon…you probably get the idea.
Unfortunately, I hate post hashtags.
Hashtags, as they appear on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, or Mastodon, are kind of a mess. They clutter up posts and eat up valuable characters — less of an issue on Mastodon than Twitter, thanks to the character limit on the former, but still very much present. They appear as clickable hyperlinks, which makes them read as more important and prominent than the actual text of the post, which is the exact opposite of their intended purpose. They can cause serious inconveniences to accessibility tools like screen readers, because they add a long list of extra words and because they can appear as #longincomprehensibletextstrings if people forget to use #CapitalizeEachWord.
#Please #stop #making #me #do #this on #posts
On top of all that, the hashtags in the post are thirsty. After a decade of Twitter and Instagram, I’m heavily associating them with spammers and #blessed clout-chasing thinkfluencers, #shoehorning that #pound #symbol in the #mid of #sentences to reach more #eyeballs. In Mastodon especially, you might also have to add a lot of different variations on a single topic hashtag, in case there isn’t one universally accepted term – which only exacerbates the feeling that you’re looking at spam.
All of this is in stark contrast to a place I find completely natural: Tumblr.
Tumblr is somewhere between a social network and an old-school blogging platform, and like most major blogging tools, each post has a section dedicated to free category tags. Tags usually appear in a smaller, lighter font under each post, visible but tastefully discrete. You can tag a post with a loose topic community name like #writeblr, a fandom or hobby name, or an internal filter that helps people navigate your blog. (Tumblr hashtags also serve some more exotic purposes, but they’re somewhat specific to the design and culture of their site.) Similar to Mastodon’s hashtag search, you can subscribe to hashtags and find people who aren’t already in your network — but because Tumblr’s interface She suggests When you add tags, it feels less awkward self-promotion and is (in my experience) widely used. Oh, and you can put spaces between words.
It’s a system I’d love to at least consider for a Mastodon, and luckily I’m not the first person to suggest it. The operator of the popular Fedi.Tips account, which serves many people’s introduction to Mastodon, recently made an official request to separate tags from posts. “Mastodon’s hashtag search system is pulling people in completely incompatible directions,” the request wisely notes. “Mastodon should have a WordPress or Friendica style to list tags separately from post content, with a separate character limit for tags.”
I’m sure there will be downsides and unintended consequences to this, but so far, there is support for the idea in the submission responses. Some point out that other decentralized systems (including Friendica, another part of the decentralized federation) have implemented separate hashes. Others note that while it can have the greatest effects on users of screen readers, it may also improve the user experience for everyone. Until someone figures out what searching on Mastodon might look like, it’s my best shot at a version of the platform that looks more portable. And above all, I might worry less about being tagged in pictures of my cat.