I love JBanana's #️⃣♊ Hashtags

2020-01-09 | #crawlers #metadata #hashtags | @Acidus

@JBanana has had an interesting couple of posts about #hashtags. They have built a Geminispace crawler that looks for hashtags, and have also built an index of all hashtags, with links to all the pages that use them.

On other services, hashtags are popular. I wondered if they could work on Gemini too. So I wrote a crawler to find them and link to them

Here is more about @JBanana's approach to hashtags.

I think hashtags are an *awesome* idea because they are an easy, unintrusive, transparent way authors can indicate what keywords or topics a page might cover.

Hashtags ❤️ Gemini

Hashtags are perfect for the small ethos of Gemini and gemtext:

• Hashtags are an easy way for authors to emphasize a thought or theme (#LGBTQ+, #cats) or make a joke (e.g. #fail, #FML)
• Hashtags can be used inline, in any virtually line type.
• Hashtags don't require anything special from the clients.
• If you want, you can assume hashtags have no meaning at all.

However, hashtags allow crawlers or indexers, like what JBanana created, to build indexes of pages with a common theme or topic. Imagine clicking on an index of "#fail", and getting a list of funny stories from around Gemini space. Current Gemini search engines don't do a good job surfacing stuff like that.

Wait... that sounds like... [whispers] metadata!

SHHHHH! Don't say the M-word! Are you trying to create yet another massive thread on the Gemini mailing list about all the surprisingly complicated issues around document metadata and how to include them in gemtext! We don't need any more of those that's for sure!

Joking aside, don't think about it too hard. Hashtags are a neat idea that can enable some cool experiments. And we don't have to get a group to agree on an approved list and language for name/value pairs!

Awesome, how do I start?

Do whatever you want! If you like hashtags, use them. Let's see what happens.