@mirabilos @Sevapopov @ketmorco @meganmariehart I notice that neither bot picked up my hashtags in the response. Is that becdause it was a response and not a post, or because everything is tied to the OP?

@mirabilos @ketmorco @farbel @meganmariehart @Sevapopov I guess this is why choice of instance matters. Problem is: intersectional interests. I'm on a Canadian instance. It's great for news - terrible for my profession, which is more global than local. But hunting for the right server for people with my professional interest feels daunting.

@iwein @GeePawHill @meganmariehart @metalbrawler I kind of wish for hashtags that aren't searchable, but usable for this purpose (I guess plain words would do, but that feels a little less directed). I do not *want* my posts to be findable by some hashtag, but this is a good use of them.

@h5e interesting use case yeah.

Maybe this works with content warning already, and we could theoretically simply use another tag symbol (if it's not recognized as a hashtag, it meets your desires)

For example &fediFunctions is very filterable to avoid post like this and it's not recognized as a hashtag. We do need to change habits for it, and that's hard.

And it can easily annoy or inconvenience people as well. Not sure what a screen reader does here, but I'm pretty sure it's not great.

@iwein yeah tbf I use cws extensively so it’s kind of a moot point

@h5e not 100% sure... I feel you're onto something. But I'm not going to figure it out I think. All good here

@meganmariehart @ketmorco @farbel @Sevapopov only if you rely on only hashtags.

I’m on a solo instance (plus a few bots I run who do not follow anyone), and it works just fine. Took a few months initially to set up my feed, then I begun unfollowing, setting people to not display boosts, etc. to cultivate it, while adding new persons who look interesting all the time.

@meganmariehart probably ok in that case, as those wouldn’t have them in the middle of sentences but in a list? Or at least rare.

@mirabilos @meganmariehart @ketmorco @Sevapopov I don't rely on them, but I think they make my experience richer. To each their own.

@farbel @Sevapopov @ketmorco @meganmariehart your post was set to unlisted, not public (as is proper for a reply), some bots only do public posts, and search by hashtag will only pick up public posts (as opposed to these bots who follow you). Some bots also explicitly exclude replies.

@farbel @ketmorco @deborahh @Sevapopov @meganmariehart somewhat. As I said, I run my solo instance and am doing just fine, connecting a lot with people from polymaths.social but also other instances, and my interests would be split across at least three major ones…

@Sevapopov @farbel @deborahh @meganmariehart @ketmorco so I guess you just pick one. (Or run your own.)

@meganmariehart cat‍

@farbel @meganmariehart @ketmorco @Sevapopov they do that on solo instances for filtering purposes (e.g. to get rid of all these word games with coloured blocks being the post), otherwise you’d need at least a small multiuser instance, but not one of the extra-huge ones.

@mirabilos @ketmorco @farbel @meganmariehart Thank you for your explanations! It was interesting to know how things work for English Mastodon. In case of russian instance where I am, there are 2 bots who repost what is posted in russian or with cyrilic letters usage. So what I found for myself is following people that this bot boosts and and following people who are boosted by my followings. That is how I find English users, I follow what people boost. Maybe there are also other ways to explore new accounts, I saw there were tabs to look server's posts in mobile apps. Not sure how about FastSM.

@Sevapopov @farbel @ketmorco @meganmariehart it works like that for all of the Fediverse

Those bots you write likely are hooked directly on the server to be able to get and boost all the posts.

@meganmariehart I have just checked your profile. sometimes random posts reach my server and I don't even read profiles.

opera singer - this is great. I have many friends in our local opera theater. I'm not a professional singer, I'm a progrsmmer, but have a "big voice" with over 3 octaves in range (low contralto as original fach and up to the 3rd octave). it took over 10 years of taking lessons from local opera soloists to build up and learn to control such a vocal. and I still work on it, trying to reach the perfect sound. and, of course, I'm a big fan of _the real_ opera (not the browser).

I had seen some composers over here, but their accounts are not much active. though, I have a couple of friends here that write about contemporary classical music (Shoenberg-like things, etc).

this is good that people of arts come to Fediverse. the most of our local musicians use FB or something like that. I wish the tag #opera could mean the operatic context. not the browser.

@mirabilos ️ Malik, I presume?

@meganmariehart @futurebird from the paws you can see that this is indeed Malik‍ ☻

He is also a bit gentler. Čara‍ recently laid across TWO laptops without a care for what she disturbs, she just does her thing. He actually wants to just be close-by. (In my experience, larger cats do tend to be more gentle, like, asking before they jump up on the lap, not just climbing across a person with claws and just assuming the person will hold still.)

@meganmariehart hmm, your own instance’s webinterface just shows 1K boosts at this point (and other instances don’t have the full number, mine shows 14 boosts for example).

But it can be asked for the full number from the command line:

curl -s -H 'Accept: application/json' https://mastodon.social/@meganmariehart/116044953904582813 | jq

(If you don’t have jq installed, just leave the | jq part out, it’s merely to pretty-print the result.)

[…]
  "shares": {
    "id": "https://mastodon.social/users/meganmariehart/statuses/116044953904582813/shares",
    "type": "Collection",
    "totalItems": 1010
  }
[…]

So, 1010 boosts currently. (Without jq it’s a bit trickier to find in the wall-of-text that is the result, but Ctrl-F “shares” might help. curl is even preinstalled on Mac OSX and Windows these days.)