I’ve got Evan Prodromou blocked so I didn’t see https://tags.pub when it was announced. If you missed it too: it’s a service that listens on relays for hashtags, and boosts posts containing them, to followers following any given hashtag. To give hashtags much more reachability despite the horizon of federation.
I proposed something like this in the context of natural disaster response. Users could come to a consensus on what hashtag to use for, say, # HurricaneFoobar, and posts containing the hashtag could spread far and wide. But because I care about safety, I suggested that it needed selective outbound relaying, so that only posts containing a list of opted-in hashtags were sent to the relay. I see that managing what gets sent to relays is out of scope for tags.pub.
I also don’t see any mention on the github issue list about tags.pub being able to defederate known bad actors, so I guess there’s nothing stopping your posts from reaching poast and friends, due to ActivityPub’s nontransitive defederation behaviour.
User-to-user and user-to-instance blocks will similarly get laundered, so if you let tags.pub boost your posts you may find unwelcome people reading your posts.
So, this is a cool idea, it could be helpful, but it’s not ready yet IMO.
Deborah Pickett
npub149…n5sv4
2026-06-28 02:28:24 UTC
Author Public Key
npub1497ymlhd7mzl9uejg25sudvjz9r4dvzcpr92t2fn5p8k0z8j9ugq0n5sv4Seen on
wss://relay.ditto.pubPublished at
2026-06-28 02:28:24 UTCEvent JSON
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"content": "I’ve got Evan Prodromou blocked so I didn’t see https://tags.pub when it was announced. If you missed it too: it’s a service that listens on relays for hashtags, and boosts posts containing them, to followers following any given hashtag. To give hashtags much more reachability despite the horizon of federation. \n\nI proposed something like this in the context of natural disaster response. Users could come to a consensus on what hashtag to use for, say, # HurricaneFoobar, and posts containing the hashtag could spread far and wide. But because I care about safety, I suggested that it needed selective outbound relaying, so that only posts containing a list of opted-in hashtags were sent to the relay. I see that managing what gets sent to relays is out of scope for tags.pub. \n\nI also don’t see any mention on the github issue list about tags.pub being able to defederate known bad actors, so I guess there’s nothing stopping your posts from reaching poast and friends, due to ActivityPub’s nontransitive defederation behaviour. \n\nUser-to-user and user-to-instance blocks will similarly get laundered, so if you let tags.pub boost your posts you may find unwelcome people reading your posts. \n\nSo, this is a cool idea, it could be helpful, but it’s not ready yet IMO.",
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