Distribute posts to instances based on followed hashtags in addition to followed users

[sfescape]

Mastodon has the ability to follow hashtags. However, this is limited to posts that are already on the server either locally or federated based on followed users. It would be great to distribute posts to instances based on followed hashtags, in addition to followed users.

It would enable small instances to easily discover relevant content even if they don't know any users on other federated servers.

[erlend-sh]

I’d love to have this. I’m not active enough in the fediverse to be actively finding the right people to follow. Instead, I’d rather just follow a few specific hashtags as my primary stream of incoming content.

mastodon/mastodon-ios#872
elk-zone/elk#905

[evanp]

Any Activity Streams object can be followed if it has an inbox and an outbox. A HashTag object would be fine in this situation.

It's entirely reasonable for Mastodon or other projects to make HashTags followable. It would also be cool to have sites that aggregate hashtag content from other services, like relays, to do this for us.

I think this is an implementation issue and not a protocol issue.

[evanp]

I have a project called tags.pub that does this pretty much exactly. It isn't currently up, but it would be interesting to see it developed. It does not yet use the public feeds from Mastodon servers, but it could.