Owning my Hashtags

Pre-pandemic, I was attending a lot of in-person meetups. One of the things I'd be doing a lot - like others at the events - is regularly tweeting about the great things the speaker is saying, the discussions of the community, or trying to win a prize!

Generally these tweets would contain an event-specific hashtag, like #TechNott for Tech Nottingham.

Because I'd moved to tweeting via my site, via Bridgy, I was seeing that these notes/replies with the hashtags were passing through my site with no way of me being able to easily go back to them. Folks on Twitter could search for them, and I could use my search functionality, but I thought about how great it'd be to be able to access them via a category/tag.

In January 2020, I added support for this, with the first tweet testing it adding the tech-nottingham tag when seeing #TechNott in the content. This then got improved by auto-linking the hashtags with their underlying tag so a viewer could more easily go out to things with that tag.

Although this is my workflow, I've been looking at moving to Barry Frost's project, Vibrancy, and so have been discussing how this could be implemented.

A design decision I'd made for my own Micropub endpoint is that I wanted to update the content of the post with the links so any Micropub consumer of the content would see it there, and more importantly, that I would add the category for each hashtag.

Thinking about it for Vibrancy, and the fact that not everyone may want this, I'm thinking that a new Microformats2 property, hashtag, may be more appropriate, which allows a Micropub client to render them using a new q=hashtag-replacements query, and doesn't enforce it for everyone, nor make the content a little harder to read.

I've found this to be really useful as a way of keeping visibility over the things I'm posting, and recommend you think about it too if you're interacting with silos that use hashtags!