Show mention of the followed hashtag

[nclm]

Pitch

It would be great to show which hashtag you follow brought a toot in your timeline.

Something like the “boost” mention but for hashtags. Quick mock-up:

Alternative would be to highlight the hashtags in the toot itself, but I’m not convinced it would make it visible enough.

Motivation

Since I started following hashtags, I have a lot of toots from strangers in my timeline. Which is great, but I keep wondering “who’s this, I don’t remember following them”. When a toot is boosted, it has a mention of who boosted them so I know why it’s there. But when a toot is appearing because of a hashtag, I keep clicking on the profile of the person, see that I don’t follow them, go back to my timeline, and look inside the toot for the hashtag that brought it here.

[nclm]

Another related option that could be interesting would be to add a “Show followed hashtags” in the timeline settings, next to “Show boosts” and “Show replies”. So you can always decide if you want a “clean” timeline with content from people you follow, or a fuller timeline with boosts, replies, followed hashtags.

[Gargron]

I'm with you on this but at the moment the way this feature is implemented, we don't have a way to get this information to the client. It will take some re-architecting and there's no way to make it into 4.0.

[Cassolotl]

at the moment the way this feature is implemented, we don't have a way to get this information to the client. It will take some re-architecting and there's no way to make it into 4.0.

Curious to know if this is possible yet, in light of the PR Change hashtags at the end of the post to not be rendered #26260?

[uliwitness]

Ivory, the client app, shows a light grey capsule with the hashtag that caused the post to be shown in your timeline. I don't know how they get this information, but I presume it must be available somehow.

[b-xb]

I ended up looking into this and put together this demo of a patch that will add the feature into the current main branch of the codebase.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/compare/main...b-xb:mastodon:feature-status-prepend--following-hashtags

In order to add the feature, a few tweaks were required to alter what data is passed on to the Status component.

I don't know enough about the underlying codebase to know how much of a significant knock on effect those changes would have to the efficiency of the application, though (for now, at least).

A neater solution would involve adding an extra flag to the Status model that is similar to the favorited flag, for example. That would involved a much bigger change to the underlying data models though.

https://docs.joinmastodon.org/entities/Status/#favourited

[James-Firth]

I think this would greatly improve the user experience, especially as common advice is to follow hashtags to find people and add to your personal home feed.

Ivory on iOS/MacOS has been doing this for a while and makes an otherwise confusing experience very pleasant and understable.

+1