@mavnn @evan In the ordinary course of events, to see the boosted post, you would have to be following the bot. If the argument is this service will help expose hashtagged posts to broader audiences, that value is only realized if the bot has followers. Some number of those who follow the bot will probably also follow people they find through it.

I think where some of us see this potentially getting sticky for very narrow or personal hashtags, the bot may be seen as an adequate substitute for following the original person. And in the case that kicked off the debate, a hashtag used by one specific person for some of their more intimate work, a bot that exists to repost that hashtag *looks like* an attempt to do exactly that. Whether intended to or not, I understand the icky feeling that gave people.

As I've expanded on elsewhere, even though I don't specifically think Evan intends this, inserting the bot in the middle is an intermediation and poses some risks. If people follow the bot as a substitute for a hashtag feed, that's fine, but it's still an account, not a feed. The controller of the bot could begin to make editorial decisions about which posts to boost or censor, could start inserting other original content, could change direction entirely, etc. And to whatever extent that works, it would have been done on the back of the original work of others plus some non-consensual mass aggregation.

@steve @evan Asked and answered, I guess. 🤣

@evan @maxleibman I'd object here: one reason 25% of Fediverse accounts are on mastodon.social is because Mastodon website suggests this as a default server to join, so newcomers not being adversed in the Fediverse won't bother searching for alternative instances. I'd say most people join through that approach vs going through all that faff of migrating your account over to mastodon.social unless I am unaware of some statistic.

@maxleibman

In addition, not all Fediverse software has hashtag feeds, so people on other platforms don't have another way to follow topics they are interested in.

@evan or you could try like

not making accounts for hashtags in posts from accounts that haven’t opted in to that behavior

you’ve made it clear you don’t think getting that kind of consent is compatible with the growth you want to see tho, so the consent gets trashed to enable the growth. that reprehensible behavior is what I’m on the fediverse to get away from.

@evan I appreciate that you are considering the objections that have been raised.

That said, I want to clarify that I haven’t asserted anyone has ownership of hashtags (and I don’t think Alice did, either). This is about the reputational effects based on how hashtags are actually used.

The phenomenon where a particular person or small group is the primary or sole user of a hashtag isn’t the most common situation, but it’s not a bizarre edge case, either.

Even if nobody owns a hashtag (and on that we agree), there are definitely many thousands of them that are extremely precise or personal in a way that makes them unlikely to ever be associated with anyone or anything else.

@evan One can just follow hashtags directly. I don't see why this is needed.