TL;DR I want Mastodon hashtags treated like communities.
Given the following homomorphism (morphism, analogy) between microblogs like Mastodon and the forumverse:
| nr |
microblog |
forumverse |
| 010 |
subscribe to hashtags |
subscribe to communities |
| 020 |
include particular hashtags in their posts |
(cross-)post in particular communities |
| 025 |
include particular hashtags in their posts |
include particular hashtags in their posts |
| 030 |
list posts of a hashtag |
view a community |
| 040 |
comment a post |
comment a post |
| 050 |
star a post |
upvote a post |
| 060 |
boost into TL |
approve "into" community |
I wish to interact with microbloggers as a piefed user. Piefed could render microblog posts that contain a hashtag as a community post within a "community" named by this particular hashtag. Also, microblog accounts could be viewed like a regular user in piefed.
Pros: Lemmy posts and communities are visible and subscriptable in Mastodon already. Piefed should complete this connectivity.
Cons: Re-interpreting microblog posts as forum entries could lead to some misunderstandings which again lead to defederation. But I cannot think of any.
Edits: Added 060, 025, TL;DR
Edit: There appears to be a Mastodon integration being planned.
Hey suff@piefed.social let me share what I've been working on here at ActivityPub.Space
We're running NodeBB, which is a federated forum software that interacts with the threadiverse/forumverse natively, but also interacts with microblogs.
Anything coming from microblogs has no community attached, so we throw it all into a single "uncategorized" bucket.
This forum I am posting from is about ActivityPub, so I set up an auto-categorization rule so that posts using #ActivityPub get slotted into general — sounds good, right? Except that tag has a fairly low SNR. Every day I have to remove 4 or 5 posts that are at most tangential to ActivityPub at all.
I ran into similar issues with #climbing for a rock climbing forum. People use #climbing when they climb rocks... but also trees, fences, buildings, etc...
So it can work, it just needs some ongoing curation. Essentially what I am trying to say is... hashtags are fine, but its usage is nowhere near consistent enough to use in a global context like you are saying.
Such flawed community picking while posting is one advantage of using microblogging. You can post regardless of having found the correct category or forum. Good point.. maybe.
On the other hand, maybe you should rename your community from "climbing" to "rockclimbing"?