Hashtags in the Sky

So Bluesky wants to change how hashtags work

Since quitting Twitter in April, I’ve become active on Mastodon, Bluesky and T2. None are perfect substitutes for Twitter (even as some aspire to be) — but the battle to define the future of the social web is often preoccupied with redefining elements of its past.

And with reason: redos are rare in the tech world. Platforms ossify and enshittify. Network effects thwart effective social graph portability. Upstarts fake it until they… get caught. It’s hard to unentrench the entrenched — especially when doing so depends upon overcoming our thumbs’ muscle memory.

While I have more to say about the fediverse generally, today my focus is the future of hashtag support on Bluesky. While still invite only, its million member waitlist implies that its design decisions may have broad cultural implications, especially as Bluesky product developer and protocol engineer Paul Frazee continues to work in public, and has sharedseveral proposals to solicit public feedback.

One of those proposals concerns Bluesky’s support for hashtags — a topic of interest and familiar controversy.

I’ve taken some time to write up my analysis of the problems he’s identified (spam, aesthetics, accessibility, and targeting content) and offered my evaluation of his proposals (i.e. visually separate the tags, allow spaces in tags, use curated tag search results, mute words and hashtags, opt-in hashtags).

If you care about the social web and the future of the hashtag, dive in. Clicking here will let you jump the paywall:

Thanks as always for considering and reading through!